by admin | Aug 19, 2026 | St Francis
Summer has a habit of arriving before our bodies are quite ready for it. After months of winter, more time indoors and perhaps a little less movement than usual, everything can feel slightly tighter than it did in March.
Now is a good time to start loosening up.
You don’t need an extreme fitness programme or an immediate assault on the gym. A few weeks of regular, gentle stretching can help improve flexibility and mobility. More importantly, it gets the body moving again before summer brings longer walks, swimming, surfing, gardening and days spent on the beach.
Start Slowly And Keep Moving
The simplest approach is to start with gentle movements rather than trying to force a deep stretch. Move your shoulders, hips, ankles and spine through comfortable ranges of motion. Add some easy squats, lunges, calf stretches and slow rotations.
Calisthenics can also be remarkably simple. Bodyweight squats, gentle push-ups, leg raises and controlled movements don’t require equipment. Meanwhile, even ten or fifteen minutes at home can become a useful daily routine.
The objective isn’t to wake up sore the following morning. It’s to become a little looser and more supple as the weeks pass.
Yoga And Pilates In St Francis
Yoga and Pilates are excellent options because both combine controlled movement with strength, balance and flexibility. There are also plenty of yoga and Pilates options around St Francis, so you don’t necessarily need to work it all out yourself.
A good instructor can help you start at an appropriate level and avoid turning your first enthusiastic session into three uncomfortable days of walking sideways.
Consistency matters more than intensity. Two or three gentle sessions each week can gradually make movement feel easier.
Your Own Summer Beach Club
There’s still time before summer gets properly underway. Start stretching now, keep moving and gradually build a little strength and mobility.
By the time the warm mornings arrive, you’ll hopefully be moving more freely, feeling more supple and heading into summer with the chassis loosened up and ready for swimming, walking, surfing or simply heading down to your very own beach club.
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Read More:
Further reading:
Early Summer Or Late Winter? – Notes From The Editor
The Lost Art Of Going Away And Doing Diddly
Réunion Island Delivers A Different Kind Of Indian Ocean Escape For South Africans
When your world starts to press in, Happy Hour awaits in Mauritius
by SFT | Aug 19, 2026 | St Francis, Travel News
There is a strange pressure attached to holidays these days. You arrive somewhere beautiful and immediately feel obliged to start doing things. There are mountains to climb, reefs to dive, golf courses to play, museums to visit, restaurants to book and local attractions that apparently cannot be missed.
Or you could ignore all of it.
There is a strong argument for taking a holiday where the main objective is to do diddly. Wake up when you wake up. Make coffee. Sit somewhere pleasant. Read three pages of a book, put it down and stare into the distance for half an hour.
Leave The Itinerary At Home
The key is not to replace work stress with holiday stress. You don’t need to get up at 6am because somebody online said the sunrise from a particular hill is spectacular. You don’t need 14 restaurant bookings, a diving excursion, a hiking route or a carefully planned cultural programme.
Also, you don’t need to know what’s going on.
Get off the screens. Don’t spend half an hour flicking through 70 television channels in a foreign country trying to find the one broadcasting in a language you understand. Do not doom scroll. Don’t keep checking the news to see what fresh disaster has unfolded while you were having breakfast.
In fact, don’t check anything unless you really need to.
The emails can wait. So can the messages, the weather back home, the sports results and whatever argument everyone is having online today.
Doing Diddly Properly
Find somewhere comfortable, preferably with a beach nearby, and slow everything down. Breakfast can become lunch. Lunch can drift towards sundowners. A swim is optional. Shoes become increasingly unnecessary.
Surfing deserves a small exemption. If you wake up and there are clean little waves peeling down the beach, it would be ridiculous not to have a board nearby. Have a surf, come back, eat something and resume doing diddly.
You might finish a book. You might sleep in the afternoon. Or you might spend an unreasonable amount of time discussing where to have dinner.
And when somebody asks what you did on holiday, the answer is simple.
Not much.
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Further reading:
Réunion Island Delivers A Different Kind Of Indian Ocean Escape For South Africans
When your world starts to press in, Happy Hour awaits in Mauritius
by SFT | Aug 19, 2026 | Notes From The Editor, St Francis
The weather in St Francis has been decidedly odd lately. We have had strange temperature changes, far too many southerly winds and very little sense of a normal winter pattern. Meanwhile, the surf has been abysma, water freezing. There have been a few moments, but anyone waiting for a solid run of winter waves has been waiting for quite some time.
Something else interesting has been happening along the beaches around the new groynes in St Francis Bay. Over the past two months, there has been a healthy deposit of sand along sections of the beach. At the same time, we haven’t had any vicious weather or those powerful, long-period winter swells washing through the bay.
Whether the two are connected is a question for people who understand coastal processes better than I do. However, it is another noticeable feature of what has been a very unusual couple of months around here.
There are plenty of theories about what is happening. El Niño – the Godzilla version gets mentioned, along with ocean temperatures and changing weather patterns. Then there are the various pressure systems moving around the Southern Ocean. However, you can stare at charts for hours and still end up looking out the window for the final answer.
The Chokka Forecast
I recently conducted some highly informal meteorological research at a fairly raucous party with a few local chokka fishermen. It was not a controlled environment, and nobody was taking notes. Nevertheless, these guys spend enormous amounts of time at sea. They watch the wind, currents and water temperatures amd understand the ocean.
Their verdict was fairly unanimous: we can expect an early summer. They weren’t presenting a complicated theory or trying to explain global weather systems. They simply reckoned the signs were already there and summer weather patterns are going to arrive ahead of schedule.
That sounded reasonable until the local surfers entered the debate. They have looked at exactly the same ocean and reached the opposite conclusion.
Winter Is Just Late
According to the surfers, winter isn’t finished because it hasn’t really got going yet. Eternal optimists, they reckon that the proper winter swells are still somewhere out there. Eventually, the southerlies will disappear, the swell patterns will improve and St Francis and JBay will get the winter surf it usually expects.
There might be a little wishful thinking involved. After several months of mediocre surf, accepting an early summer means accepting that winter didn’t deliver much. A late winter leaves the door open for September to produce something worthwhile.
So we have two groups calling an early summer and a late winter, respectively.
I’m Going With Summer
I’ve decided to side with the fishermen. This isn’t based on any deep understanding of climatology, El Niño or the Southern Ocean. I’ve simply become accepting to the idea that winter might already be packing up. And it’s east next week.
Besides, I prefer warmth. If the choice is between waiting hopefully for another month of cold fronts or accepting an early summer, summer gets my vote. I would still appreciate a few decent waves, but they don’t necessarily have to arrive with freezing mornings and howling westerlies attached.
Perhaps September will prove the surfers right. For now, though, the warm days, strange winds, quiet surf and growing beaches have me leaning in the other direction.
What do you reckon? Early summer or late winter? It’s like a metaphor of life.
the editor
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by SFT | Aug 17, 2026 | St Francis
The Belgium Beer Festival is heading to Cape St Francis Resort on Saturday, 5 September, bringing beer, sausages, live music, rugby and a distinctly European flavour to the village.
The event combines two festivals in one, with the afternoon starting with a Munich Beer Festival before Belgium takes over for the evening. Add a Beer Run, an Oompah band, the Springboks against the All Blacks and a chilli-eating competition, and it should be a fairly lively Saturday.
Two Festivals In One
The Munich Beer Festival runs from 14:30 to 20:00, complete with a traditional Oompah band and plenty of German festival atmosphere. From 20:00 until midnight, the Belgium Beer Festival takes over, with live music from Me & Mr Green.
Food will also be a major part of proceedings. Festival tables include organised seating and dinner, with Belgium sausage platters and eisbein on the menu. Meanwhile, anyone feeling unnecessarily confident can put their taste buds to the test in the chilli-eating competition.
Tables cost R4,500, or R450 per person, including organised seating and dinner. General festival tickets cost R200.
Beer Run And Big-Screen Rugby
Before the main festivities begin, there will be a dress-up Beer Run through Cape St Francis Resort at 13:30. Entry costs R50, and dressing up is part of the occasion.
Rugby fans are also well catered for. The Springboks take on the All Blacks, with the match shown on a big screen during the festival.
German and Belgian beers will be on sale throughout the event, completing a Saturday built around food, music, rugby and, naturally, a healthy quantity of sausage.
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The Belgium Beer Festival takes place at Cape St Francis Resort on Saturday, 5 September. For bookings and further information, email seals@iafrica.com or contact Jason on 071 274 5725, Anita on 082 494 3755, or Kimon on 082 787 7700.
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See also:
Worth Fighting For – an excerpt from the Beach Restoration Project video
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