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Stuff from Johannesburg

59th Edition Of The South African Surfing Championships Heads To Victoria Bay

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59th Edition Of The South African Surfing Championships Heads To Victoria Bay:

The 59th edition of the South African Surfing Championships will take place at the popular right-hand point break of Victoria Bay from 2 – 4 August.

After 58 years of the tournament, this contest is rich in history. Out of those years, the event has been held at Vic Bay five times, with the 2024 edition being the sixth time at this esteemed venue.

SA Champs was first held at Victoria Bay in 1984 and won by Leonard Giles and Kay Holt. It came back to the area in 1990 and was won by Carl Roux and Kay Holt. In 1996, Brad Bricknell took top honours in the Men’s while Kay claimed her third victory at this venue.

In 2000, Antonio Borteletto and Tamarys de Maroussem won; in 2008, the last time it was held at Victoria Bay, Shaun Payne and Heather Clark emerged victorious.

The defending Men’s Champion is Thomas Lindhost of Buffalo City. Tom is the top seed for this event. Louise Lepront won the Women’s title last year but will not attend the contest. She will compete in the US Open Challenger Series event at Huntington Beach on the weekend and will not be at Vic to defend her title.

Local surfer Shaun Joubert, who won the ISA World Men’s Title in Panama in 2013, is competing, along with two-times SA Champion Sean Holmes. Tasha Mentasti and Danielle Powis, both former SA Masters Champions, are also in the draw.

“It’s always very special to have SA Champs at Vic Bay. It is where my career started, growing up here,” said Sean Holmes. “It’s like a natural amphitheatre for a surf contest, with the waves being so close to the walkway. The surfers are literally 50 feet away from the spectators and it feels like a place where everyone gets so involved. The wave can be tricky sometimes, with a couple of bumps and steps, but it is so consistent, and it looks like there are going to be fun waves this weekend; I can’t wait,”

At SA Champs, the winning District is determined by a combination of all the allocated points scored by team members. Buffalo City was the winner last year and was awarded the coveted 45-year-old Presidents Cup.

The Surfer of the Contest is awarded a trophy donated by Barry Wolins in 1996, and the most consistent surfer at the event is awarded the Dave Fish Trophy.

Other surfers with excellent competitive records who will be going all out for titles include David Emslie, Max Elkington, Jake Elkington, Ryan Bisset, and Christian Venter, to name a few.

Women surfers include the likes of Lily Heny, Zia Hendricks, Gemma Hanafey, Camilla Heuer, and Natasha Van Greunen.

With so many top surfers competing and coveted prizes and trophies on offer, this weekend’s SA Champs event will be exciting to watch.

The surf forecast for Victoria Bay looks promising. Good swell and light and variable winds are predicted, tending towards offshore on the finals day.

The event can be followed on Live Heats  www.liveheats.com/surfingsouthafrica 

Distributed by Surfing South Africa

Victoria Bay. Photo: @gumbootcamera

Video: 59th Edition Of The South African Surfing Championships Heads To Victoria Bay

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Top Star Drive-In: The Cinema on the Mountain of Gold

The Ferreira Dump began growing in the late 1800s, composed of the crushed rock and chemical residue left over after early, inefficient mining processes had extracted as much gold as the technology of the time allowed. By the 1960s, it was a flat-topped, man-made mesa overlooking the city. In a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, the surface was tarred and the Top Star Drive-In was opened. It quickly became a South African institution. Its appeal was not just the movies, but the unparalleled view: as the sun set, the massive white screen would flicker to life against a backdrop of the glowing skyscrapers of the Central Business District, separated from the viewer only by the elevated M2 highway.

In the decades before television arrived in South Africa (1976), the Top Star was a primary social hub. It was a democratic space in an undemocratic time; while the city below was strictly segregated, the “car” served as a private bubble that allowed a degree of social freedom not found in traditional theaters. For many Johannesburgers, the Top Star was a site of nostalgic rites of passage—first dates, family outings where children were piled into the back of station wagons with blankets and flasks of tea, and the Saturday “car market” where the parking lot transformed into a sprawling hub for buying and selling second-hand vehicles.