Surfin’ safari

Had a couple of emails asking a relevant question on my Chris Stone/Kelly Murdoch series: was I ever a surfer?

Even though none of the books in the series are specifically about the sea, I always return to the ocean as a subliminal link. In so doing, I talk a lot about surfing as well as fishing. Fishing I do know something about, inspired by my dad, a true waterman. Way back in the 1930s when Mozambique was truly wild and unspoilt, he paddled the bay of Maputo in a homemade canvas canoe that he had to bail frequently. Even as a teenager, he could navigate by the stars. In WW2, he enlisted when he was 17, getting his mother to sign for him as he was underage. (She thought it was a university enrolment application). His regiment, the Transvaal Scottish, was sent to the war raging in the Libyan desert, where he also learnt northern hemisphere astrology under the Saharan skies. He was captured at Tobruk and spent the rest of the war as a POW digging in salt mines in what was then Czechoslovakia. He didn’t see the sea or megawatt skies for three years. To this day, I wish I had asked him more questions about those times, as he seldom talked about them. Thankfully for his children, he left a diary. I only read it after he died.

However, going back to surfing. Truth be known, I was not a board surfer. Never even tried. Instead I was what we back in the (South African) day called a paddle-skier.

At the time we weren’t considered proper surfers as we used a paddle and didn’t stand up. But we countered that saying we could catch a wave further out – something now taken to impressive extremes with jetski tow-in surfing. Also, if we wiped out, we could Eskimo-roll back up and carry on as cool as a cucumber. We could also Eskimo-roll under a breaking wave, flipping up as cool as the aforementioned cliché. That’s the theory. I never truly managed that as although I was an okay Eskimo-roller in a swimming pool, under a thundering eight-footer on Durban’s beaches … well, not so much. Suffice it to say I did a lot of swimming, which I suppose is not so bad as now, at 71-years-old with a less than perfect spine, swimming is what keeps me upright.

Sadly, I could not portray my Chris Stone/Kelly Murdoch characters as paddle-skiers as – well, it doesn’t sound as cool. But the concept is the same. To me Mama Ocean is the source of life.