Is South Africa Surfing’s Best Hidden Asset?

To loosely borrow from Twiggy Baker in our How Surfers Get Paid series, there’s a hell of a lot more to Africa than Mick’s Rattlesnake. That was just one of the serpent heads he was willing to chop off, and, frankly, it was far from the deadliest.

Even South Africa, the continent’s most celebrated surf destination, feels unscathed. As Jordy Smith put it in HSGP, there’s no real reason to leave J-Bay. Even when it’s firing, the crowds barely register. 

Probably not the worst place to hire a car, drive the coast, and hunt for empty waves, assuming you don’t mind dodging the occasional 10-foot fish with a taste for human. That’s exactly what two Aussie underground lads, Jordy Liackman and Cooper Puttergill, did. Then they made a movie out of it. 

For some context — this is the second documentary-style film Jordy’s put out this year, and it’s all him, no sponsors or sugar daddies. His first, Chasing Seconds, was a reckoning with adulthood — breaking his back for a living, coming to terms with the grind, swallowing the discomfort, and accepting that, in the end, it was all in the name of preserving the real goal: hunting waves.

Both films are DIY to the bone, narrated by Jordy himself. So, are we looking at the next Anthony Bourdain (rural Australian version) of surf filmmaking?