Living in a coastal village, sand is integral to our lives.
One of the main reasons St Francis Bay became well-known was that an American named Bruce Brown discovered a wave here in 1963, along with Mike Hynson and Robert August. The essential ingredient that makes this wave exist is sand – the sand build-up off the former dunes formed a perfect sandbank for waves to peel uniformly along they point, which they did for about 300 metres, proving an absolute delight to surfers.
The discovered moment in St. Francis in South Africa is one of surf filmdom’s most revelatory and compelling moments. There are bigger, better, scarier and more exciting waves in many other surf flicks, but none quite as satisfying as “Bruce’s Beauties.”
“From all the information we could gather, we figure it’s like this about 300 days of the year,” says Bruce Brown in the narration. “The water was seventy degrees. The prevailing wind there straight offshore.”
How wrong was he? It only breaks a few times a year, depending on the frequency of south swells.
By pure luck, Bruce and his crew arrived on a magical day. A fresh south swell was running, the wind was offshore, the water was warm, and there was bright sunshine.
The real story was that the crew was further down past Main Beach and, according to history, were “irritating each other” when one of them noticed a little wave peeling in the corner, walked away from the irritating people to go and have a look, and boom! Discovery time.
The footage of the discovery in the movie was actually staged a few days later and took a long time to get right, as any movie production does take. They filmed it repeatedly, with Brown trying to make it perfect.
Then, as people realised how cool this little village was, the dunes were stabilised for development. Port Jackson and Rooikrans willow were introduced, the sands stopped feeding the beaches, and the waves stopped pumping.
While Leighton Hulett probably had the idea to stabilise the dunes, Tom Brown was the man who did the toil. Tom was most likely the visionary who stopped the critical flow of sand and now has a boulevard named after him. Being a Liverpudlian, he would have had little understanding of the dynamics of surfing.
When The Sand Returns
For the last few days, the waves have been pumping at Bruce’s, and inexplicably, there is so much sand along the point that a wipe-out involves pushing off the sand bottom every time as it is so shallow.
The sand has deposited due to a few easterly winds and swells, possibly shifting some sand from the extensive offshore sandbanks.
It’s a great indicator of the future, of what could happen when we have groynes and a million cubes of sand being pumped onto the beaches.
Shallow water makes for hollow waves, and the surfing kids of St Francis Bay (and a few of the ballies) have been living their best lives, racing along the perfect waves of Bruce’s Beauties and thankful that some sand has temporarily returned, even just for a short while.
That section -© Manfred Adrio/Facebook
Read more: The Discovery Of Cape St Francis
Read more: Early Morning Drama – Notes From The Editor
See more:
Recent Comments