Maxing Monday

Author: Mike Dei-Cont

1st September 2008

Maritime warnings were announced on the news and folk across SA were battening down the hatches for what was expected to be one of the biggest swells to hit in a long, long time. Of course boogers had been tracking it for weeks, making plans on where, if at all possible, to tame the rolling beasts.

And so it was, according to Murphy, I was up to my eyeballs in work when I bailed the day job and raced to KalkBay over Boyes Drive to check out the carnage.

From the top road I could see but a handful of guys in the water. Not the usual 30+ guys that claim 'The Reef' as their local break on a 3 foot glassy day. There were bits of furniture floating around in the line-up, the main road was backed up from Muizenberg to Simonstown and the carpark was choking with onlookers.

The intermittent rain forced me to shoot from the Brass Bell which lay in ruins. The tidal pool was little more than a speed bump as the sets smashed into the restaurant. The front half of the deck was already washed away leaving only bobbing tequila glasses, bits of lemon, tattered menus and the occasional floorboard plank floating around - inside the restaurant! Most of the people watching from the Bell were marooned on the tables while I just stood my ground and got soaked to the bone!

The waves varied from clean nuggets offering in-out barrels to monster close-outs from reef to the restaurant. Guys were going hard as some of the lesser experience guys scratched for the horizon and others dropped into heaving pits. Don Bassett no doubt took the hardest beating when was the only one to paddle for a particularly large wave only to skip out on the double-up and get dealt a monster lip to the back of the head! Game Over for Don.

Peter Lambert, nut that he is, paddled out with his camera and took set after set on the dome trying to score the elusive monster shot. Of course broken boards, snapped leashes and beatings were the order of the day but long after the bruised bodies and egos recovered that swell, that day, will be remembered for many years to come.

As the 'old toppie' fisherman said as I was leaving "I've been fishing here for 50 years and I've never seen it this big!"

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