Watch: Riding The Sardine Run
Six months after Place Of Thorns: The Story Of Puerto Escondido, NowNow Media have released something a little closer to their South African homeland.
Riding The Sardine Run combines an annual biological phenomenon - the sardine run that attracts all manner of predators to Africa's south-east coastline - with another natural phenomenon. The seasonal arrival of deep south-west groundswells running sidelong into South Africa's many righthand pointbreaks.
There's J'Bay of course, where the surfers make the obligatory stop off, before continuing north to the Wild Coast and onwards to KwaZulu-Natal. The last song of the film is titled 'Who you share it with' which seems to sum up the film's plot. In this case it's not which other surfers we share the lineup with but which other animals, while also observing their patterns and behaviours.
Comments
Great watch . NowNow put out some great stuff.
Thought that voiceover was satire at first :)
Great footage in there, and that Wild Coast is amazing how you can follow dirt tracks and just drive up onto these beautiful headlands with epic point setups.
Maybe like east coast Australia fantasies from 60 years ago.
I know Andy, half way through and I'm still second guessing it.
Lindo below, epic experience.
Surfed the point there at Umdumbi River mouth in July '78 - stumbled on it looking at a map of the local area as there was no decent surf at Coffee Bay. Stayed in empty rondavels near the point - think they belonged to a church maybe, and now are a surf camp. I was hitching to J Bay from Durban with a Sth Af bru who told me recently he had a bit to do with the idea for this film. We didn't know about the shark issues along Wild Coast at the time, but did learn of attacks there later. Nahoon Reef was already known for it's big whites though. Took a few days to hitch from Umtata in Transkei to J Bay - arrived on 2nd day of a 2 week swell. Port Elizabeth drug squad had raided a couple of days beforehand and locked up a heap of local surfers, mostly on suspicion, as they could in those days - held 'em in custody for 2 weeks.
Sounds like not too much had changed by the time I was there in 2010.
Very quiet, even postively bucolic along that stretch of coast.
I was having flashbacks of Point Lookout or somewhere similar in the 70's.
But without the little township.
Didn't surf at Mdumbi itself but had a session up the coast a little ways at the point where Ethan Ewing and Seth Moniz recorded some footage a while back.
Not a secret spot but you'd still be doing well to find it on your own.
Fucked if I would have hitched anywhere that I saw in South Africa in 2010, that would have been an incredibly foolhardy thing to do.
While I was based in Durban I drove through Umtata quite a few times on my explorations down the coast and I reckon a tourist wandering on foot would have lasted about an hour max.
And just to add, we didn't see another surfer till we got to J Bay. The locals did the usual of watching from the headland. Guessing a lot like the NSW - S Qld points must have felt when discovered and surfed in the 1960s.
That was fun. You get accustomed to the narrator eventually. Some great non-surf footage as well.
Cheers AndyM, and yeah hitching probably was foolhardy back then as well, but maybe less so than now - I've never been back. Had a few lucky breaks. The hardest bit on the way there was from the S outskirts of Port Elizabeth to J Bay - ended up getting a lift with two young women (yep, farmer's daughters) back to their protea farm not that far from J Bay. They lived with their parents so 'nothing untoward' requiring a shotgun happened. Super kind of the family. Got a hitch the last 15 miles or so with a young bloke the next morning - he was heading to Cape Town after his army training. Just as we topped the rise with the view of J Bay (pumping) the boards blew off the roof. Mine (a custom Darrell 'Rooster' Dell Balance design 6'11" swallow-flyer didn't get a scratch (well packed). Bru lost his fin but got it repaired same arvo. Hitching back the SA rand ran out - spent 1 night in the jail in Kokstad then got a lift in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of locals right through to Durban.
Yeah hitchhiking missions are always full of stories, some dodgy but mostly good!
Hopefully that 6'11" was just what was needed :)
That was really good, not much looked easy, Saffa's are next level when dealing with conditions.