AT THE BEACH | EL surf lifesaving club goes beyond the call of duty to help others

It is hard for me to describe just how fabulous the East London Surf Lifesaving Club is. I run out of superlatives.

The club was there on Nahoon Beach before I started surfing and I started a long time ago.

What a fantastic institution it is and who can even vaguely guess how many lives have been saved due to this club?

How many guards have been trained here that now look after our beaches from Port Alfred to Port St Johns and beyond?

How many youngsters now have a solid appreciation for the ocean, team sport, winning and losing, health, vitality, opportunity and life.

I cannot say enough about the Princes, Woods, Fenns, Smiths, Tebbutts, Gallows, Rooses, Breetzkes, Malherbes and on and on.

My apologies — I have left out far too many names. It is all about family and, wow, what a legacy, what a history.

The ELSLC members have just returned from the DHL SA Masters Lifesaving Championships in Gqeberha. Approximately 300 athletes competed from 18 clubs across the length and breadth of our land.

Our home team came a credible fifth behind Fish Hoek first, Summerstrand second, Umhlanga Rocks third and Clifton fourth.

The big cherry on the top, though, was our own Joshua Fenn, the victor ludorum of the whole show. What a colossal achievement.

This writer spent some time with team captain for this ELSC SA Masters outing, Peter Fielding (age 75), showing that there is no expiry date on how much fun you are allowed to have down at the beach.

Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson is a favourite for me. It is difficult to categorise him but Wikipedia comments that he is a “blend of cabaret pop and classical music influences with indie rock and experimental musicianship”. With Easter weekend about to sneak up on us (Easter Sunday is April 5), Watson is particularly appealing to me right now. His track Adventures in your own backyard strikes a chord. The song sets an emotional undertone of, don’t go looking too far away from home for connection because “it is right here beside you”. But at this time I am looking at the direct physical statement of the song in geography “12 steps into your backyard. Through tall green grass, and into the world. Ain’t it feel right? Ain’t it feel nice?” And yes it does. Right after my own heart. I love the front door of my home and heading out into the blue. Yellow Sands, Kwelera River mouth, might just be that blue. It is about 20 to 35 minutes drive out of town if you live in Buffalo City. You can think of Yellow Sands as an adventure in your own backyard. Sure there are temptations to head for Mozambique or Plett, Namibia, Cape Town or Ipanema, but what about your own backyard? No long road trip, no airport, no customs, no exchange rates, no carousels. The adventure is right here. The slipway surfing community at Yellows is unique and drenched in good people, good times, good food and good fun. If not a tasty braai on the rocks, then it is a picnic basket as easy as a stop in at Crossways on the way to the break. The family vibe on the slipway is exceptional, from eight-year-old children learning to surf on easy rollers up the river to 64-year-old geriatrics on 9.0 longboards surfing left or right breaking waves at the backline of the river mouth. Stop off and chat to Dave Ridge (East Coast Surfboards) if you want to know anything about your board or order a new board from him. Take a surf lesson from Wayne Monk if you want to raise your game and once the bug bites you for the area, you might want to talk to local surfer Hein Ketterer about some real estate. Just down from the mouth at the first rocks, a left-breaking wave often rolls in off the caravan park. Further down the rocks towards Glen Gariff, another left breaks to spread the crowd. The name of the break is Secrets and there is a good chance you will be surfing with Olly Pascoe and his mates if you paddle out there. If a day trip, sunrise to sunset on the slipway is not enough for you, then you might want to book in and tent, caravan or chalet at the Yellow Sands Caravan Park. You can wake up to the rumble of waves on your doorstep and an average water temperature of about 18 degrees. You can go to bed with the same gentle “gquma” to put you to sleep. The on-site coffee shop at the swimming pool is a great place to unwind and a chip and a putt away you have Olivewood Golf Course, Inkwenkwezi Private Game Reserve, Chefani, Chintsa, Crawfords, Emerald Vale Brewery, Tea in the Trees, Prana Lodge, Areena Riverside Resort, Sama Sama Coffee & Smoothie Hotspot. As well as bass fishing, rock and surf fishing, deep sea fishing, horse riding, dirt biking, mountain biking, Buccaneers Beach Lodge, Queensberry Point, Queensberry Left, Glen Eden, Kwenxura River, guided botanical walks, art and estuary fishing for spotted grunter on the Kwelera River! Are you kidding me? What more could you think of asking for? My next favourite track from Patrick Watson is Here comes the river. This is a tragic melodic piano lament about being overwhelmed, drowning in life while fighting to survive. It is a description of the fight-or-flight lifestyle so many of us lead but the adventure in your own backyard is the antidote. This is the real lure, offer and benefit of Yellow Sands and the East Coast Jikeleza. Take a break this Easter. Have an adventure in your own backyard. You don’t need to go far.

Pete competed in malibu, surf ski, swim and long run. He tells me that he became a lifesaver semi by accident.

He wanted to surf ski paddle with his late brother around Cape Point and in those days you were not allowed to enter if you did not have an SPA (surf proficiency award), so Pete joined a club and got started.

Pete has been in love with the sea since about 1970.

When he started surfing in Cape Town, there were no wetsuits, no board leashes and between him and his five buddies, they had three boards to share in total.

Freezing, broke and keen as mustard, the bug bit and never let go.

Pete ended up studying a BA at UCT, majoring in English and philosophy. He says he was a bad student and surfed too much because he took four years to get a three-year degree.

He seemed to get over the bad bit because he then secured a BSC in zoology and chemistry. Then followed some traveling, surfing and earning money catching fish on fishing boats.

He earned enough to work six months and travel six months, and save enough to study honours, master’s and a Phd!

All along Pete never lost his love for the ocean.

By the time Pete got to his honours year on account of his travelling and working, he was about seven years older than his then-girlfriend, Bridgit who was in the honours class with him.

Ever the adventurer, Pete had a kombi at the time and took the entire honours class on an extended trip to the former Transkei, so much so that they all missed their graduation.

Pete has travelled the world over and can recount stories from all corners of the globe, in the water, under the water and next to the water.

Much like this writer, any time outside of the front door of the home is a good time.

I asked deputy headmaster Bridgit how she managed all Pete’s energy.

“Oh, he makes life interesting,” she said. “He is never boring.”

“I feel like when I surf, my mind goes quiet,” 16-year-old Jordan van Eek tells me. This, I suspect, is good for the young Stirling High School scholar because she must have a very busy mind. If she is not number one in her grade, then she is in the top 10. And she likes to be there, so she is inclined to keep her head down when it is time to work. In grade 10 now, Jordan has chosen meaningful subjects: English, Afrikaans, Pure Maths, Physics, Biology and Geography. When I arrived to interview the teenager for this column, her maths and physics books were open on the desk. Not because she has a test coming up but because she wants to keep on top of her studies. With some of her other sports, Jordan says, she can sometimes find herself asking, “Do I really want to do this?” Like when it is time to get out of bed and swim lengths in the pool for water polo. “But for surfing, I always want to go out,” she said. A typical blue mind, Jordan is happiest when she is near the sea. Blue mind, by the way, is “a psychological and neurological concept, popularised by Dr Wallace J Nichols, describing a mildly meditative state of calm, peace and creativity experienced when near, in, on or under water. “This state reduces stress hormones (cortisol) while increasing feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. “Red mind by contrast is the anxious, overstimulated and stressed state often experienced in daily life.” Source: AI. Jordan is disciplined, motivated and self-driven. No surprise then that Zoe Steyn is her favourite local surfer. Zoe and Jordan are both goofy-foot surfers, surfing with their right foot forward, and Zoe is Ms Hard Work personified. Neither of these two young ladies expect any good results to land in their laps just because. Jordan does some running and skateboarding for her cross-training. In truth, she is not that fired up about contest surfing but is attracted to free surfing and just wants to be the best surfer that she can be while meeting people, making friends and having a good time. “Jordan is a sea spirit, oops I mean free spirit,” says her mom Tammy, the slip of her tongue being more accurate than might have been intended. She started surfing at age five and began competition surfing at 11. She took her foot off the gas on her surfing for a while to favour water polo but has recently found surfing rising to the top again as her ideal, first-choice pastime. Kwelera/Yellow Sands is her best break and going out surfing with her dad, Ivan, is a regular highlight. Jordan’s love of the waves is not easily dampened. A time ago, she was stung on the back of her knee and thigh by a Portuguese-man-of-war that burnt a dark whiplash on her leg that left her dizzy and seeing stars and with a meaningful scar. Scars are medals, I told her. By the big smile on her face, you can tell that the colossal sting is not vaguely going to keep her out of the water. For Jordan, surfing competition is just a byproduct of being at the beach with all her friends and having fun, so she took part in the Junior Summer Surf Series and was selected to be in the Buffalo City Grom Games team. The grom games is a highly effective Nelson Mandela Bay/Buffalo City entry level surfing competition serving as a feeder system into provincial and SA surfing. There is no shortage of green and gold surfing blazers today that first cut their teeth at the grom games. Our Buffalo City grom games team is very ably administered by local provincial surfing. Athletes in the recent Discovery Surfers Challenge might be pleased to know that their hard-sweat entry fees contribute to grom selection and grassroots support for surfing at entry level. In recent times, Buffalo City has dominated the SA surfing scene at Junior, Open and Masters level. Not to be left out, at this last weekend’s Sea Harvest Grom Games, Buffalo City annihilated their EP opposition with a gigantic 47,380 points. Nelson Mandela Bay limped home with 20,859 points. Showing her class, Jordan won her U16 girls division. The other Buffalo City champions in this event were U8 Boys: Griffin Enslin; U12 Girls: Nicole Eleftheriou; U14 Boys: Luke Pederson-Horn; U14 Girls: Priya Tese and U16 Boys: Kai Hare. Buffalo City dominated the runner-up positions to convincingly overwhelm their Bay opponents. Click here to join the Daily Dispatch’s WhatsApp channel and get the latest news delivered straight to your phone

Pete loves his ELSLC family and is greatly pleased with the nippers, who are out and about, and away from cell phones, Xbox, computer games and the like.

Club leadership like Travis Smith, Keith and Sharon Jones and so many others in the club have his respect.

There are too many medals from this most recent SA Masters lifesaving championships to list them all, but local surfer Andre van Wyk deserves a nod, coming home with two gold medals in double ski (with Hennie Roos) and taplin, two silver medals in iron man and surfski, and one bronze medal in surf swim.

The World Masters Lifesaving Championships take place in Gqeberha in November this year.

No doubt our home club will come home with some international gold.

ELSLC is a feather in our cap.

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