Great watch . NowNow put out some great stuff.

Thought that voiceover was satire at first :)
Great footage in there, and that Wild Coast is amazing how you can follow dirt tracks and just drive up onto these beautiful headlands with epic point setups.
Maybe like east coast Australia fantasies from 60 years ago.

Surfed the point there at Umdumbi River mouth in July '78 - stumbled on it looking at a map of the local area as there was no decent surf at Coffee Bay. Stayed in empty rondavels near the point - think they belonged to a church maybe, and now are a surf camp. I was hitching to J Bay from Durban with a Sth Af bru who told me recently he had a bit to do with the idea for this film. We didn't know about the shark issues along Wild Coast at the time, but did learn of attacks there later. Nahoon Reef was already known for it's big whites though. Took a few days to hitch from Umtata in Transkei to J Bay - arrived on 2nd day of a 2 week swell. Port Elizabeth drug squad had raided a couple of days beforehand and locked up a heap of local surfers, mostly on suspicion, as they could in those days - held 'em in custody for 2 weeks.

And just to add, we didn't see another surfer till we got to J Bay. The locals did the usual of watching from the headland. Guessing a lot like the NSW - S Qld points must have felt when discovered and surfed in the 1960s.

That was fun. You get accustomed to the narrator eventually. Some great non-surf footage as well.

Cheers AndyM, and yeah hitching probably was foolhardy back then as well, but maybe less so than now - I've never been back. Had a few lucky breaks. The hardest bit on the way there was from the S outskirts of Port Elizabeth to J Bay - ended up getting a lift with two young women (yep, farmer's daughters) back to their protea farm not that far from J Bay. They lived with their parents so 'nothing untoward' requiring a shotgun happened. Super kind of the family. Got a hitch the last 15 miles or so with a young bloke the next morning - he was heading to Cape Town after his army training. Just as we topped the rise with the view of J Bay (pumping) the boards blew off the roof. Mine (a custom Darrell 'Rooster' Dell Balance design 6'11" swallow-flyer didn't get a scratch (well packed). Bru lost his fin but got it repaired same arvo. Hitching back the SA rand ran out - spent 1 night in the jail in Kokstad then got a lift in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of locals right through to Durban.

Yeah hitchhiking missions are always full of stories, some dodgy but mostly good!
Hopefully that 6'11" was just what was needed :)

That was really good, not much looked easy, Saffa's are next level when dealing with conditions.

we did a run from capetwon to Johnesnesberg in a Van in 2006. did it in 3 months. was epic, so many good waves and uncorwded. Quennsbery bay, Nahoon, points south of durban.....so mnay waves. one that sticks out, was an Illuka breakwall setup, delviering standup barrels. Locals where super welcoming, even told us of anumber wave to check down the coast.... epic - agree I wouldn't of hitchhiked anywhere along there. had three incidents on the roads with local cops, all of whom we had to pay off.....
on the flip side, two places we stayed gave change in the form of green,,,,,, classic...

take out all the filler, and its a mid range 2 minute surf flick.

Hitch-hiking in South Africa, or anywhere for that matter, definitely has its pluses and minuses, and for sure there are significant risks. In my case, and I guess most everyone's, it was a matter of necessity at the time (not enough $ for a car and I really wanted to surf in the Transkei on the way to J Bay). That 6'11" Balance design (Darrell Rooster Dell shaping and Bruce Stringbean glassing) last 2 1/2 years and went round the world - the customs crew on the cross-channel ferry from the Netherlands to UK got a big laugh out of it, and it got left, safely, in airport storage in different places incl. Delhi and Kathmandu. I ended up breaking it in half on a too-late drop at the racecourse right-hander in Bali in 1979. Out there by myself early morning - by the time I got to shore the front of the board had been claimed by local kids. I had a 7'2" I'd left there in reserve. Boards were longer in those days (still are for me!).

When I was there with some mates, we never at any time felt unsafe, it felt just like being in Oz, apart from the whole apartheid thing of course. I’ve worked with quite a few saffas over the last few years, scary shit, especially around Durban. Not sure why the guys in the movie keep referring to the Transkei, it doesn’t exist anymore, we needed passports to get in and out. Maybe it will always be thought of as the Transkei over there.

Cool, exciting and very interesting. Any more?

(I haven't watched the vid, I'm talking about the first hand experiences above. Thanks for sharing those fellas.)

Some classic stories there chin - great getting those memories down. Speaking of passports, I got into the Transkei on the coast road through south Natal - no checkpoint there in July '78, so no stamp, no worries. I was totally oblivious. Later on, hitching from Umtata, a builder who lived in East London gave us a lift - got to the Kai River crossing and there's the checkpoints - got a stamp on the Transkei side, crossed the bridge and the first thing the South African border guards ask is 'where's your entry stamp to Transkei?' They were ok about the explanation so we're back in the builder's ute heading south to East London when 5 km down the road there's a checkpoint and cops are looking for crew smuggling dacca out of the Transkei - main export crop in those days. The cops came over to the ute, shone the big torch into our faces - felt like a roo in the headlights - they knew the builder and waved us on. As above, when I finally got to J bay, the place was near empty of local surfers as the Port Elizabeth drug squad had been through a couple of days earlier and arrested a heap of crew on suspicion - held 'em in jail for 2 weeks as they could in those days. Strange days - Steve Biko had been murdered the previous September, Mandela was in jail and it was difficult to imagine things would ever change. But of course they did.