Jaco Steyn making the most of a fun beachie

– Wesfokenkus –

Words and Pictures by Graham Howes

Road tripping up the West Coast is always a gamble, especially when you have a time restraint. We all know the the chances of scoring the wave of your life and of course the reality of getting ‘skunked’ all to well. Yet we put ourselves through it time and time again in search of the perfect ride. The drive is all too familiar, the train tracks, the red dirt roads, the yellow potato fields. It’s like dejavu all over again.

We rocked up at Elands greeted by a packed line up of euro kooks, SUP’s and and the stench of rotting kelp. This place isn’t what it’s cracked out to be, and quite frankly they can keep that wave. Before the dust has time to settle at the foot of the Elands baai koppie, we say good bye and good riddance! Greener pastures lie ahead

Darryl Partington

We wake up on the farm, the steam from my coffee cuts the through the cold air, we stand outside, watching the the orange breaking through the darkness of the sky, we can hear the wave’s hissing from over the dune, we know there will be waves, we can feel it in our bonesl as the icy offshore breeze bites our necks.

As we sip on another cuppa java we are warmly welcomed by the Weskus legend himself, Albert Burger. He generously takes us all to his home spots’ on his doorstep, the swell is Westerly 3-4ft clean and a strong offshore, Weskus as good as it gets. The coast is like an amusement park, ranging from mellow reeling point breaks to gnarly shore-breaks with bantam size barrels, and slabs that make your balls retreat faster than you can dial your mum’s number.

The boys feeling a little fragile from the night before, trying to find the energy to paddle out.

We surf it all, the boys hit fun right-hand beachie to work off hangover and sweat out the brandy, then we move over to the hollow left point, were Darryl (the only goofie footer) has spend the past hours surfing it alone, maxing out on tube rides. By lunch time the tide drains and changes everything we paddle out to a right hand point with a little ledge section throwing a solid little barrel, the shape of the reef seems to make the wave bend and the wave just keeps on wrapping at you. As the westcoast goes we surfed it with just the 3 of us out. With more set waves than we could handle.

We had one more surf on the cards before the long trip back to motherland, but our plans had a drastic twist. When we arrived at Yoyo’s a surfer was knocked off of his board by a great white, and it wasn’t a small one either. So we did what any sane people would do, we packed our boards and headed back to Cape Town, back to the shackles of conventional life. We hadn’t even left the dusty roads before we forgot about the shark encounter and started planning our next trip back the the land of barrels, brandy, and bonfire’s.

Till next time my dear friend.

Hjalmar Larsen

Yet another left goes unridden

Albert Burger aka 'Farmer Burger'

Darryl getting more than his share.

Darryl on yet another bomb

Hjalmar Larsen a frequent visitor to the weskus.

Surfer: Darryl Partington

Bjorn Larsen

Hjalmar, too fast for the camera

In the green room

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For accommodation, we stayed on Farmer Burgers farm, lekker 5 sleeper, self catering weskus units, situated between Elands and Lamberts bay.

Steenbokfontein Accommodation:

R550 per unit per night

Reservations: Kitta Burger on   027 432 2720   or cell   073 179 6433

https://sites.google.com/site/steenbokfontein/