PERFORMANCE DRIVEN
I WANTED TO TAKE OFF HALFWAY DOWN, PULL INTO THE TUBE, HIT THE LIP. I WANTED THE PERFORMANCE
My five brothers and I grew up on the beach bodysurfing with our cousins in the shorebreak, playing in tin canoes and watching our uncles surf for hours. When they came in we would jump on their boards and try catch waves. There was no real introduction to surfing, it just happened.
One of our uncles was John Whitmore, a South African surfing pioneer and the first real surfer in the Cape. The older guys in Cape Town always rode bigger waves and I wasn’t going to sit on the beach, so I’d paddle out with them.
When it started maxing out at the beachbreaks around Cape Town we’d go to the Outer Kom, a deep-water left off the tip of Kommetjie. The Kom is where I really developed my love of bigger waves.
I used to sometimes get criticised that I would ride too small a board, but only once or twice did I have it so big at the
