Australia's Surfing Life Magazine

Sandmining

Tuesday, 20 January 2009 23:30

Words: Evan Slater          

Pics: DJ Struntz 

Waves: Cory Lopez, Peter Mendia, Hank Gaskell, Mitch Coleborn

A one-to-five second tuberide is a trinket. A quick jolt of stoke to make your session or brighten your day. A five-to-10 second tube is a trophy, something to display on the mantelpiece and recount to your mates around the fire. 10 to 15 seconds of tunnel vision and it starts getting weird. Almost uncomfortable, like, maybe you better get out of this thing before it causes brain damage or fever blisters. But 15 to 20 seconds? That’s when you break into a whole ’nother dimension. Being enclosed starts feeling so . . . natural, as if you’re supposed to spend the entire length of a 300-yard long wave in the barrel. Your mind drifts to other things. About the fruit salad you ate for breakfast and the sticky sweet taste of Nutella on your toast. About getting the rental truck stuck in the sand for the tenth time and the disturbing smell of burning clutch. Only when you emerge from the tube do you realize what just happened. And that’s when the real dilemma occurs.

Until my recent trip to Southwest Africa, I would never have been able to tell you about the four stages of tuberiding, or the “real dilemma.” For all my surfing life, I’ve been floating somewhere in the “trophy” zone of barrel realization, collecting gold-plated, quicktime memories for the archives. A double-spit here, a foamball ride there, but nothing close to what I – along with Pete Mendia, Hank Gaskell and a software developer named Brian Gable – experienced along a remote stretch of African desert. For more than two weeks, this two-kilometer lefthand sand point teased us. Threw us a few corroded Portuguese doubloons from a nearby shipwreck and kept us begging for more. The chosen destination for this year’s edition of the US Google Earth Challenge, Skeleton Bay looked even better in person than it did from space. An endlessly perfect sandspit, side offshore in the prevailing wind…but hopelessly small and fast. Attempting to surf it – especially backside – redefined the phrase “two-pump chump.” But just when we’d lose hope, a chest-high set would unfold from the top of the point in mesmerizing symmetry… one, two, three or more lines barreling in a holy trinity of sand, wind and swell. “Why can’t it be a few feet bigger,” we’d muse. “It’s like hooking up with the hottest girl in the world and taking her home,” said Hank, “but she won’t let you touch her.”

But then, at a point when we had given up, she put out. Bigger than we had hoped for and beyond what we had imagined. Best waves of our lives. Twenty-second tubes all around - no exaggeration. You can ask Hank, Mendia or Gable, but don’t ask for proof, there’s no video. Google Boy forgot the camera in his room that day. And even though staff photographer DJ Struntz nearly killed himself trying to shoot the spot from all angles, desert flatness and the sheer length of the point made it like trying to capture a herd of charging elephants with an Instamatic. So, I understand if you cite “lack of evidence” and decide to call bullshit on this story. In fact, I hope you do.

The ’70s had intrepid trailblazers like Peter Troy, Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson. The ’80s had tubehunters like Jim Banks and Peter McCabe. The ’90s had supercaptains like Martin Daly and this decade has self-described “computer nerds” like Brian Gable. All are legitimate surf discoverers; the only difference is that Gable never left his cubicle when he began his hunt for the world’s best wave. Intrigued by the announcement of US mag SURFING’s Google Earth Challenge two years ago, the 30-year-old Californian scoured the globe in his off-hours, boldly scrolling where no surfer has scrolled before. He narrowed down his list of choices, sent them off to the magazine with high hopes, but never got the call.

This past year, though, the Challenge became his obsession. And why not; it’s a cool competition. All you need to do is find the best looking setup on the planet using Google’s killer ‘Google Earth’ application. Find a really crazy wave in some unlikely part of the world, and the mag will send you there. Gable really went cyber feral this time around, spending as many as “60 hours” checking satellite photos and – using his skills as a software developer at the Irvine Company, a job “just like The Office, but not funny” – created a spreadsheet ranking his uncharted spots according to categories like “safety,” “consistency” and “accessibility.” When he crunched the numbers, Skeleton Bay won out over promising setups in southern Chile and northwest Africa. But that was only Phase One. Next step for Gable was to find a contact in the Skeleton Bay area who could document it from land. He must have hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, because early on he connected with Naude Dryer, a 25-year-old desert dog who also happened to be one of the only true locals at Skeleton. Naude (pronounced “no idea”) snapped off some photos on a decent day, Gable included them in his entry along with a watertight sales pitch, and the mag just couldn’t say no. Gable got his wish — he was on his way to Africa. We even let his cousin Mike tag along.

Of course, his free trip came with a few strings attached – in this case, four pro surfers, a photographer and a mag editor hungry to surf a potentially world-class new wave. It wasn’t hard recruiting the pros: Mendia, Maui shredder Gaskell, Cory Lopez and Aussie Mitch Coleborn only needed to see the fuzzy jpegs to convince them to sign up. Dates were set, plans mapped out and we all converged in the land that literally translates to “huge nothingness.

“See this here? This is why you can’t veer off the path I’ve made.” Naude is leading our small caravan in his Landrover Defender for our first check of the Bay. After securing all the necessary permits, letting most of the air out of our tires, and powering us through soft sand for an hour, he pulls over to show us the perils of driving in and around these massive dunes. Walking away from the tracks, he stops at a flat, dark area that looks more solid than everywhere else. With one small jump, he breaks through the thin crust and sinks up to his waist in goopy wet sand. “It’s not quicksand,” he says. “But you’d never be able to get out of it on your own.”

Dryer is a born-and-bred desert dweller. His ancestry dates back to the first German settlers in the country and his parents own a booming whale-watching and dune-tour company. Naude is their chief guide and has a business on the side pulling clueless Italian tourists out of the muck he just showed us. Looking at the infinite hills of untracked, caramel-colored sand that says “you may enter but you may not leave,” I’m convinced we’d never have been able to reach Skeleton Bay without Naude’s help. This desert is one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet — a place where even the Bush Tucker Man would have a tough time. The only water source is the horrific-tasting tsamma melon, dew from the ever-present morning fog and maybe the meat of a dead Cape Fur seal or stray gemsbok. As Naude said, “They should have that show Survivor here. The only difference would be if you survive — if you actually live — you win.”

It’s always been that way here and will be long after we’re gone. For the past 80 million years, highly refined grains of quartz have washed down from highlands 1000 miles inland, traveling via the Orange River and settling along the coastline. Then the wind does its job, a relentless, cold southwesterly that starts in the morning and never glasses off. It’s this southwesterly that’s been blowing sand since well before T-Rex roamed the planet, and the result is breathtaking. Perfectly sculpted mountains of brown sugar, some 1000 feet high that cover an area the size of Switzerland and keep moving at a rate of 50 feet a year. The Atacama compares in age, but no desert compares to this one in terms of beauty.

The sand and wind are also what created Skeleton Bay and a handful of other spits in the area. Most of the coastline here is hopelessly long and straight. But every hundred miles or so, there’s an inexplicable bend in the beach, an accidental miracle that happens to work out just perfectly for us surfers. A geologist even studied Skeleton Bay a few years back, and observed that it’s only been around for the last 25 years or so. A slight change in the “mean wind direction” created it, he argued, causing new sand to be pushed onto an existing spit at a different angle. This also means it could easily disappear as fast as it arrived. Nature’s version of sand in an hourglass.

Not wanting to waste any more time on this day, Naude jumps back in his Landrover and assumes the wheel. He blazes in high gear, up and over vertical inclines as we scream and white-knuckle it in the passenger seats like teenagers on a roller coaster. Google and Cousin Mike are slapping high-fives in the back. DJ finally stops talking up front, and Naude is as indifferent as the desert itself. “I do this every single day,” he assures us, casually balancing on two wheels through another hairpin carve. “Trust me – it’s safe.” Since Cory is the only guy with any kind of off-road skills, he follows as best he can with the other surfers in a low-riding, bald-tired Nissan Navarra. In the North Shore of dunes, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s driving the equivalent of a 5’2” twin-fin. “There’s no way we’re making it up over that one,” he says, already feeling the spin and eyeing the largest untracked, knife-edge peak yet up ahead.

Naude knows it, too, so he stops again and lets us take in the view. When you’re standing on top of such a vast sea of untouched dunes, you can’t help but play in the world’s largest sandpit. We dive in it. Roll down it. Do cartwheels off it. Unscrew our fins and ride it. Lopez, Mendia, Mitch and Hank even try to jump on a board together and slide down, choo-choo train-style. After just 30 minutes of frolicking, you realize that sand is everything here. It’s in your eyes and ears and hair. It fills your pockets, your shoes and your car. It blankets the sky and blocks out the sun whenever the winds kicks up. It seeps into your very soul. 

“Skeleton is just over that next dune there,” says Naude, pointing ahead. “Cory: we can go around this one and you should be able to get through. If you can’t, we’ll tow you out.” So we all jump back in, navigate through more collapsing mountains and finally reach the beach. We breeze by a Cape Fur seal colony, at least 500 deep, and watch as a hungry jackal plots his next attack. We see an African penguin, washed in from the icy Benguela current and on the lookout for Big Z. Another deep-sand sprint around a large bend, a few more rotting seal carcasses and at last, our first across-the-bay view of the wave we’d been traveling three straight days and 10,000 kilometres for. Even at waist-high, with a machine-like succession of lines marching down the point in perfect order, it looks like the eighth wonder of the world. “I can’t believe I’m actually seeing it in real life,” says Gable, almost choked up at the realization that he’s finally here.

Cory is a little more pragmatic in his assessment. “I don’t care how long it takes,” he says, mumbling something about renting a house and bringing his girlfriend over. “When this wave turns on, we’re gonna get the best waves of our lives.”

Hope is the best thing to pack on a surf trip. It’s easy to carry, you don’t have to pay extra-baggage fees and it makes everything from the daily wake-up call to the evening meal a hell of a lot smoother. Give pro surfers hope on a trip, and they’ll do practically anything. Take it away, and they’ll pop in the porn-a-thon and never leave their rooms.

Fortunately, hope came by the boardbag-load on this trip. It didn’t matter if it was small early-on; the potential of Skeleton Bay had us dreaming up tube poses from the moment we laid eyes on it. And at waist-high, just mindsurfing it was better than actually riding most other spots. So, with spirits high and at least three swells of varying directions on the charts, we figured it had to happen. Probably sooner than later.

Until then, the crew was more than happy to sample the other waves and sights this country had to offer. They dicked around at a fun little wedge off a local shipwreck — a Russian trawler that drifted off in the night and planted itself on a random stretch of reef. They surfed erratic slabs and Hossegor-like sandbar setups. They even took a trip to one of the oldest seal colonies in the world — a place where Portuguese explorer Diego Cao first touched land more than 500 years ago — and surfed a fun left chock-full of bobbing pinniped heads. Seeing this, along with the ripe stench and the deep, emerald water permanently stuck around the 12 degree mark, you’d think this would be a great white’s version of Sizzler – all you can eat, all the time. But according to locals, it’s not high on their list of concerns. “It’s the only place where white sharks’ teeth have been found,” said Naude. “But in all my years here, I’ve never seen a shark or heard of an attack.” Maybe sharks, like surfers, haven’t caught on to this place yet.

We also tried to make the most of “the big nothing” on land. We checked the small town where Angelina Jolie posted up and gave birth to her daughter, Shiloh, two years ago. We hung with the locals: Carlos, Naude’s girlfriend Katia, a talented American expatriate surfer named Jay and a bunch of crazy German windsurfers who forced Jager-bombs on us every night. We met “Johnny,” a Damara tribesman who could carve palm seeds with intricate detail and wow the tourists with his “click” language. (“Hey!” said Mendia. “That sounds just like Starvin’ Marvin on South Park!”) We drove the endlessly empty unmarked salt roads, straighter than a Kansas highway, and stopped at the occasional unattended roadside table peddling salt rocks. Three bucks a rock – pay on your own honour. It is on these roads, when you’re hours away from the nearest town and there isn’t another life form for as far as the eye can see, when the “big nothing” is truly something.

But inspiring vastness and South Park jokes only get you so far on a surf trip. At some point, that hope’s going to deflate like a punctured tire in the middle of nowhere. And after almost two weeks of “fun” waves at other spots and only brief flashes of potential at Skeleton, the mood swung violently to the southwest and started blowing. Hard. Mitch was out of there. He’d been sick the whole time anyway and had to get to Huntington in time for the US Open. Cory bailed, too. Even though he left kicking and screaming and vowing to return, sponsor obligations forced him to head to HB as well.

While the rest of us— including Google Gable and Cousin Mike — were supposed to head to J-Bay at the same time and finish up our trip there, a final low pressure system drifting off the coast convinced us to stick it out ’til the end. “J-Bay can wait ’til next trip,” said Gable, who knew he might never make it over this way again. “This time, we’re putting all our chips down on Skeleton.”

In 1908 somewhere in the Southwest African desert, a bloke named Zacharias Lewala was busy clearing sand from a newly built railway near the coast. Due to the shifting dunes and relentless wind, he was on the tracks regularly for the German Colonial Railway company, scraping away with his oiled shovel so the connection between two key towns could be completed. One day, he ran across something that didn’t feel like the track or an ordinary rock. He picked it up, brought it to his foreman, and said, “Must give Mister little klippe (stone). Is maybe diamond!” The foreman shrugged it off, and put it in his pocket. But when the foreman handed it over to his boss, and he confirmed that Lewala was right, it sparked one of the biggest “gold rushes” in African history. Towns sprung up overnight. People arrived in droves just to comb the dunes. Some got rich. Others died. But that same river that gives this region its dunes and Skeleton Bays also gave it its diamonds. As many as 3 billion carats of ‘em allegedly survived the long, wet trip from the highlands, only to be scattered just offshore and along the beaches. Before diamonds became a militantly controlled commodity, before DeBeers and the Sperrgebiet and every other system in place to prevent you from getting lucky, people could literally find diamonds in the sand. More than they could carry. More than they could wear. More than they knew what to do with.

Thinking about what that must have been like is the only way I can begin to describe our very last day at Skeleton Bay. It’s easy to recount the things I witnessed: the exploding energy as we rounded the bend at dawn. The man-hugs on the beach and the scrambling into our suits. Jumping into the chilly water and watching the current carry Peter down the beach at a steady clip. The first real set bending and grinding off the top of the point, and Mendia driving off the bottom, disappearing through one 50-yard section, emerging briefly, then pulling back in for 10 seconds more. Hearing his primal Lion-O roar 200 yards down the line. “I’m still gnawing on my hands right now,” he later said.

I can tell you about when the tide dropped mid-morning, and how it got even bigger and more below sea level -- like five reverse Kirras strung together. How every drop was an air-drop into the pit and the freight train of a lifetime. How Google boy put in a valiant effort and pulled off a gem for every sand-sucking disaster. And how Hank said, that after surfing three days of all-time Deserts in Indo a month before, he got quadruple the amount of tube time in one day at Skeleton. 

All that stuff is easy is to recount. But the feeling toward the end of the day, when I was stiff, cold and exhausted but remained in the water, is something I’ve never experienced before. Ten hours straight, and the perfection just kept coming. One set after another, and we surfed ourselves to utter silliness. By the time the sun started dropping, it was almost like one of those bad dreams, where you see a perfect wave coming, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t move your arms. There were more tubes than we could ride. More diamonds than we knew what to do with. 

The best wave of my life occurred at exactly 10:37 a.m., African time, on July 21, 2008. I didn’t see it coming; I guess you never do. But the experience was surreal — as if I was suddenly transported into Kelly Slater Pro Surfer and some video game whiz started playing me. A solid 6-foot set out the back, a fairly easy drop, and then I just watched it line up clear to the bay. In the tube, out of the tube, back in  — hmmm, maybe I’ll cruise back out again. It went like this, for section after section after section, until I suddenly realized that I had never ridden anything like it. I emerged from the final drainer on the inside, threw up my arms in a half-confused claim and just stood there for a moment. After 28 years of riding waves, of dawn-patrolling Oceanside slop and launching at 20-foot Maverick’s, I had reached the pinnacle of my surfing career. What do I do now? Pull a Laird and let my emotions fly in the channel? Be like Shaun Briley and quit? Do I paddle back out like nothing happened at all? That was the real dilemma — a dilemma I’m still trying to process months later. But at the time, I did the only thing I thought appropriate. I gusted to the shore. Kneeled down. And kissed the sand.