One last pilgrimage for the reborn surfers

His surfing companions were the same ones they’d been ten years earlier. Their destination was the same, indeed, it looked exactly the same too. What didn’t look the same was the three of them.
A couple of hairlines had been heading west for a couple of years, a couple of recalcitrant waistlines had been refusing all attempts at trimming and a couple of complexions were as pale as PVA after too many weekends spent chasing deadlines.
But none of them were going to call their mates on that. There was a kind of mutually assured embarrassment that kept them from pointing out the obvious. In fact, most of the critical comments were at their own expense.
“Ja, I’m getting a bit of a boep, hey…”
But otherwise, everything was the same. Three mates going surfing at Sardinia Bay they same way they’d done in 1996 or so. Same leisurely cruise down the Seaview road, same parked-up Sardinia Bay lot. Same Wurstwagen offering the same crisp, juicy käsegrillers at basically the same prices.
And the same surf.
Crumbly cross-shore one-footers flopping onto the outside sandbank and then fading out almost immediately before re-forming briefly and crashing onto the beach near the rocks on the lifesaving club side of the beach.
“We can surf that little left-hand re-form,” he said eventually, after they’d been staring mutely at the mush for a couple of minutes. One of his companions couldn’t help wondering under his breath, “What re-form?”
But the left re-form it was to be. The three reborn surfers returned to the car, unveiled their flaccid physiques, freed their receding hairlines from the trucker caps they’d lately taken to wearing and engaged their stiff, absent-minded muscles in the process of suiting up.
They stuck their borrowed surfboards under their freckled arms and locked the car. Then they started realising things were not quite the same.
In 1996, they would have stashed the car keys in the right-front wheel hub. In 1996 the car might’ve been broken into. In 1996 they weren’t driving a brand-new sports sedan.
So what were surfers doing with their keys when they went surfing in 2006? Secreting them in their wetsuits? Perhaps, but of course, there weren’t car guards at Sardinia Bay in 1996 either.
He decided to stick the keys in the wheelhub, same as always, but compromised a little. He hid them in the right rear wheel this time.
They strolled to the water’s edge and the beach looked smaller than he remembered it. He’d caught his first wave here in the Seventies, on a polystyrene boogie board from the Pick ‘n Pay Hypermarket.
He’d been to lank 21sts at the lifesavers’ club, and the one matric after-party. Just before he went overseas, he had his farewell braai here, just a bit around the corner on the rocks.
He’d brought his one girlfriend here the one time, on their first date. And Sardinia Bay had seemed vast with possibility that afternoon, back in the mid-Nineties. Now it seemed small, like the passages of your primary school when you go back to visit.
The memories seemed so much bigger than the reality.
At the water’s edge he loosened his leash from where it was coiled around the fins of the dusty vintage Liquid Art he’d salvaged from his mate Cliffie’s garage. He made a cursory attempt at a stretch routine, found it was more painful than it was worth and entered the water with no further ado.
By the time he’d waded waist-deep into the water, he was already practically at the line-up. He cast a glance up the beach to the island of offshore rocks he’d swum out to once with Cliff during the holidays between standard five and six.
There were kiteboarders out there. Two of them, projecting five, six metres high off the faces of the knee-high waves, then turning and racing back towards the beach for more.
He’d been meaning to try kiteboarding, just… never got into it, as they say. Now he was pushing forty, living in Jo’burg and it didn’t look he’d be learning to kite-surf any time soon.
But he was out the back at Sardinia Bay on a sunny day in the middle of summer, having a laugh and a couple of waves with his two best chinas. Just like the old days. He didn’t need six-metre aerials for this to be a fun day at the beach.
It made him feel a bit older. But cool with it.