Tom Curren Surfs The J-Bay Avalanche

The 30th year anniversary of SA surfing's great untold story

With the Corona Open at Jeffreys Bay in full swing, in this episode of The Luke Alfred Show we look back at Tom Curren’s epic J-Bay ride there in 1993. Captured by filmmaker, Sonny Miller, and immortalised in the 1996 film, “Searching for Tom Curren”, Curren’s ride was the perfect coming-together. First, he was surfing royalty; second, Miller was keen to make history on his custom-made board and, thirdly, a once-banished South Africa was waking to the world. So much for setting the scene, this is Curren’s J-Bay story, a story which is also about the construction of one of surfing’s greatest myths.  

If you were an international surfer with a social conscience in the late 1980s, South Africa was a destination you thought twice about dropping into. True, some visited the place, but for others’ the social and political stigma of going to a country in the throes of the cultural and political boycott was too obvious to turn a blind eye to. 

So you stayed away, tending your social capital, hoping that the apartheid regime buckled to the point of collapse. When it did, you could venture south to sample J-Bay’s famous right-hander and smoke some of South Africa’s equally famous weed with a conscience as clear as the southern African surf.

Jeffreys Bay in the 1980s was a conservative backwater full of face-brick holiday homes that aimed to stay a conservative backwater full of face-brick holiday homes. Cheron Kraak, the founder of the surf-wear brand, Country Feeling, tells a story, for instance, about Mark Kealoha, the world champion from Hawaii, wandering into a Wimpy restaurant in J-Bay where they refused to serve him. 

Petty apartheid was in full swing at the time and they wouldn’t sell Kealoha a shitty burger with a side of greasy fries because he looked black. How unspeakably pathetic we white South Africans were. 

Little did the backward-looking burghers of Jeffreys Bay realise that what they wanted was beside the point, because they had only walk-on parts in a grand narrative called history. With Nelson Mandela’s release from Paarl’s Victor Verster prison in February, 1990, their beautiful corner of the Southern Cape coast changed. Many thought it changed quickly for the better. Surfers from around the world started to visit. South Africa was no longer the world’s most instantly-recognisable non-destination. 

South African surf had been on the world map since Bruce Brown’s iconic surf documentary, The Endless Summer, in 1966, where some of the scenes were shot at Cape St Francis, and suddenly it was kosher to test the water. The country produced fine surfers – think of Shaun Tomson, winner of the 1977 World Championships – and whether it was surfing at Kommetjie or on the Wild Coast, there was a 3000-kilometre long coastline to explore and get lost on.

Derek Hynd, the maverick former World Tour surfer, surfing journalist, theoretician and all-round groovy Svengali, cottoned-on to the opportunities provided by a liberalising SA quicker than most. At the time Hynd was the team manager for Rip Curl, the surf wear manufacturer, and his brainchild was a concept called “The Search” where elite free surfers would travel the world to surf in as many exotic locations as they could. 

Their rides – and lifestyle – would be filmed for promotional purposes for Rip Curl, all of which built a growing wave of surf mythology. Waves were endless, as were exotic locations. “The Search” could theoretically go on forever.

Hynd reasoned that if “The Search” swung by places like the Philippines and small islands in the Indian Ocean, why didn’t it come to the southern tip of Africa now that South Africa was no longer forbidden territory? Hynd loved Africa and was always eulogising about it in his articles. He rhapsodised about Jeffreys Bay to his surfer buddies. As he played around with the idea of including Africa in “The Search”, he realised that he knew just the man for J-Bay, the Californian, Tom Curren. 

Curren, a former world champion, already famous for his break prowess, was the guy to surf one of J-Bay’s famous right-handers. If Hynd could get Curren to J-Bay he might have a great chapter in the unfolding story of “The Search” on his hands. Little did he know how great it was going to turn out to be.

Curren was one interesting individual. Laid back to the point of taciturnity, his dad, Pat, was a grand old daddy of the sport. Pat first gained a name as a patient, selective surfer, always peacefully awaiting the right wave far from the maddening crowd. Later he became a legend as a surfboard shaper whose longboards were much sought-after across the surfing world. Aged 90, Pat died in Hawaii in January this year. 

As Pat’s son, Tom was to the manor born. He had one of the best tutors in the game and went on to become a three-time world-champion. He had name and pedigree and lineage – he was effectively surfing royalty. 

Get Curren to J-Bay to surf on one of the bay’s famous right-hand breaks and Hynd would have some prime surf real estate then and there. Like Nelson Mandela, Curren had an elusive will ‘o the wisp-type quality. You somehow expected to know more about him, given who he was and where he came from, but no-one really did. 

Like his old man, Curren had that disappearing-over-the-horizon quality. He was always – metaphorically-speaking – sitting on his board in a pool of calm out beyond the breakers. Eventually he surfed his wave, sometimes to perfection. But the next time you looked he was gone, which kind of led you to believe that he wasn’t there at all.

At the time Curren junior was holed-up in Hossegor on France’s Atlantic coast where he lived in a cocoon of mystery. Very few people outside of the small surfing fraternity had actually seen what this guy could do. Wouldn’t it be great if Hynd could induce Curren south? To the fabled continent? To Africa?

Hynd also realised only too well that if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no-one there to see it, then it might not have not fallen at all. If he was successful in getting Curren to J-Bay, he needed to get a cameraman there too. He knew just the guy, a Californian surf filmmaker called Sonny Miller. Sonny was game. In the mid-winter of 1993, thirty years ago to the month, Sonny and his 35mm camera flew to South Africa to await Tom Curren’s arrival.

The story gets soggy from this point on but basically amounts to this. With very little preparation, Miller started shooting Curren the very day he arrived to surf J-Bay’s premier break, the fabled Supertubes. If Miller had little preparation, Curren had even less. On the afternoon of his arrival, he hopped on a carefully custom-made board and paddled out to the swell in a black-and-pink wetsuit. 

His board was commissioned by Hynd and shaped by master-shaper, Mark Rabbidge, who had a good working knowledge of J-Bay’s waves, having lived there briefly with Hynd. By commissioning Rabbidge, Hynd was upping the ante. Here he was, like some brilliant theatre set constructor, arranging all the moving parts: Rabbidge provided the perfect board for the perfect surfer. Now all Curren had to do was to surf the perfect wave.

As Miller said many years afterwards: “We all knew that Tom was coming. And so we were, like, get your cameras greased and make sure they’re working ‘cos the guy’s going to arrive and the waves are pumping.”

With a matter-of-fact, no-frills charm for which he was famous, Curren went at one of J-Bay’s famously long waves. Watching videos of the wave, the first thing you notice – even to an upcountry novice like me, who knows nothing about surfing – is the aggression with which Curren attacked the wave. All smouldering intent, he was very serious. 

When he was in the Indian Ocean water, Curren had a kind of coiled purpose not far from anger. As he and his board charged down the wave, moving across the screen from right to left, what we see thirty years later is a harsh little lesson in surfing beauty. Curren rode and rode. He didn’t flinch. He was awesome.

There’s only one moment when he threatened to lose his balance and fall off the board as he rescued things with a cut-back and then he was off again. He raced through not one, not two, but three barrels and came out at the other end of the point exhilarated and profoundly alive. 

It’s a great ride, on a great wave, on a blessed afternoon in a South Africa that in 1993 was yet to be democratic and it’s a ride that took him straight into surfing folklore.

Hynd might have been obsessing about “The Search”, but Miller’s doing his own thing and living “The Moment”. Even today you can see Miller’s intent and poise as he guns that board down J-Bay’s right-hand break in a way that demonstrates that he’s just so incredibly into it. 

It gets you thinking that in the water things are metaphysically meaningful in a way they aren’t on shore. On shore things are just muddy and clumsy and difficult and profane. In the water you’re there and it’s it and that’s that. It’s all just so fucking gorgeously simple. 

Back on land it’s different. You don’t knock cheekily on the door of heaven on land. Or most of us don’t, at any rate. On land you’ve got other people to deal with. Other surfers to deal with. And it’s not only other people, which reminds us of what Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, once said: “Hell is other people.”

You’ve also got everyday hassles and shit to deal with. Until you get back out on the water, everyday hassles can go on for every day. Every day can go on for absolutely ever, so much so that it pretty much feels like every other day. The only way to get out of the doom loop is to get back in the water.

But let’s not forget that you’ve also got language to contend with, that heavy unknowable thing. Words can never be mastered. The more you try, the more you sound like you’re drowning in soup. 

Which all goes to show that being on land is basically about being all at sea.

Miller said afterwards that he didn’t fully appreciate the significance of Curren’s ride at the time. It was an analogue age. You didn’t re-look at what you’d shot that easily and you shot an awful lot of stuff. 

He was conscious, he said, that something intense had happened out there on the water, but he only realised later what it was – when Curren’s ride started speaking to him and speaking to thousands of others who could immediately register the ride’s beauty. 

Hynd might have had a word, too, because, through “The Search”, he was invested in making the whole bang-shoot meaningful. I stress, however, that this is just supposition on my part. It’s in no way backed up by the historical record. I don’t know if it’s actually true.

In 1996 (dates are often pretty hazy in surf culture, as evidenced by the fact that we still do not know the day of the famous Curren J-Bay ride) Miller released a film called “Searching for Tom Curren.” Searching is a pretty big thing for surfers, a key word in the surf lexicon. They spend an inordinate amount of time doing it when they aren’t actually surfing.

If they aren’t searching for other people’s boards like Curren, they’re searching for obscure islands in the Pacific, searching for the best breaks on that island, the best waves in that set, searching for the best part of the wave, or their best ride, or their best moment on that best ride.

It’s often unclear as to whether they’re searching for the search or simply undertaking a kind of straightforward search on its own terms without too much mystical shit on the side. Whatever the case here, the film created a splash, won awards – notably from Surfer magazine – and contributed pretty heavily to the Curren myth and the myth of the wave and the myth of J-Bay as having the best right-hand break in the world. 

Curren, a vague Clint Eastwood-type figure on the edge of things, came to Africa, where the country on the southern tip of the continent was about to be liberated. It was all orchestrated by Hynd. And filmed by Miller. The film was shown and the culture took over and quietly, down through the years, Curren’s J-Bay ride became quite the thing. 

Looking back, it was a fascinating coming-together, not only of time and place but personnel. Hynd was the ideas and the words guy; Miller was the images guy back on the beach or shore; Curren was neither the words nor the images guy, he was the moment guy or, more precisely, he was the in-the-moment-guy. 

That was his thing, the ability to stay purely in what he was doing and do it well without frills and without justification: Tom Curren and the lost art of doing something really well for its own sake. How simple, how timeless, how cool.

The soulful nobility of allowing some small aesthetic act to speak for itself and not besmirch it later with language and culture and meaning and hype is, for me, Curren’s singular achievement on the J-Bay break. Even if you don’t sense this to be the case, it can be inferred. It’s very obvious that language wasn’t Curren’s thing, and it probably wasn’t his dad, Pat’s, either. Like Eastwood in his early films, the less they said the better it was, because the more they said the more they confused you and confused the shit out of themselves. Best be silent and ride a wave.

Take just one example of Tom’s mind-shredding inarticulacy: “When you’re standing next to a wave and you’re just standing there, you don’t have to do anything. You’re just standing next to this avalanche and that can express something.”

Wow, Tom, where do you think up that weird shit man? Out on the water? What soulful gems are you going to pull out of the depths next? And to think that you’re actually standing? Most of us are out there’re on our boards, lying down, paddling for dear fucking life. Standing must be a prelude to what you really do, which is presumably what? Actually walking on the water?   

Bullshit aside, you kind of know what Curren means with his reference there at the end to the avalanche’s ability to express something. But what is the avalanche expressing? Could be it that it’s expressing nothing more than being an avalanche? Being itself, in other words? 

And once it’s expressed being an avalanche, what then? Presumably you can’t just stand next to the avalanche forever? Sooner or later you’re going to have to ride the avalanche, because that’s what surfers do when they aren’t searching. That’s when the rubber hits the road and the men are separated from the boys and things begin to get really interesting. 

Maybe Tom is talking about riding the avalanche and his use of the word “standing” is misleading. Perhaps what he’s saying – reduced to its essentials – is that making meaning can be pretty trying but you can make a kind of meaning out there on the waves and that in itself can feel pretty good. 

And, yes, Curren expressed himself pretty well out on the water, as the ride at J-Bay in ’93 demonstrated. He was pretty good at that. And pretty pithy too. It was only when he was back on shore that shit mounted up like a wave, so much so that he had to spend a fair whack of time hiding away in an obscure French surfing town wondering if, finally, the world was going to leave him alone. 

As I’ve researched and written this podcast, I’ve come to feel sorry for Miller, the man who felt the need to leave his famous father so terribly far away. Yes, Miller was roped into Hynd’s “The Search.” Yes, he became an ambassador for free surfing. And, yes, he allowed his ego and vanity to get in the way of his surfing in the sense that he allowed the culture to package and re-package his little bit of history in whatever way it saw fit. 

But here’s the thing. Curren was making a point – his point. He was doing something well for its own sake, speaking his own language. I sense that he might have left it at that but that wasn’t good enough for Hynd. The weird booster figure that he is, Hynd had to make sure Miller was on hand to capture it, at which point the culture took over and a surfing legend was constructed.

The factual quiddities of the Curren-Miller-Hynd trinity aren’t in dispute. The wave happened, Curren’s ride happened on it and, although Miller took a year or two to process it all (in the figurative as well as the literal sense), we are able to watch it today because of him. 

Beyond that, you don’t have to be Roland Barthes to see the heady constructions of mythology kick in. Curren’s ride happened at a time when an outlaw country was in the midst of no longer being outlawed. It happened in a place where all kinds of things were expected to happen. First, Curren was great for the right-hand waves that always broke at J-Bay; second, “The Search” was on; third, the logic of “The Search” was inexorable because once you initiate a search you’re obliged to find something that retroactively justifies that searching. 

Failing that, your search lasts forever. And no one wants a search that lasts forever. First because a search that lasts forever is heart-breaking. Second because a search that finds nothing is a very bad search and therefore simply boring.

Perhaps I’ve been looking in the wrong places but nothing that I’ve ever read about Tom Curren and the ride from here to eternity ever makes this clear. Is this perhaps because surf culture is too busy reproducing itself as a renegade pursuit, standing at an angle to the world to take this kind of shit seriously? Or maybe this kind of brazen intellectualism just doesn’t sit well with folk on their boards? 

Whichever one it is, you’ve got to conclude that surfing, for all its pretensions to being the coolest gig in town, is inextricably linked to the culture and political economy it prides itself on being different to and possibly even better than. Isn’t late capitalism always restlessly seeking new pastures, new terrains, new markets? Isn’t surfing always restlessly seeking new sets, new breaks, new waves? 

In this way, surfing is just an allegory of late capitalism, with the flip side of this allegory being that idea that somewhere far away, just over the horizon, is a lost surfing paradise. The fact of the matter is that it isn’t there folks, unless we start to surf on Saturn, because we’ve ruined them all. Thirty years ago, however, there was one. It happened in the mid-winter of 1993, at J-Bay on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, when a thirtysomething surfer called Tom Curren surfed a right-hand break on Rabbidge’s custom-made board with such wild intensity that it became immortalised forever more.

I’d like to particularly thank my mate, Byron Loker for his thoughtful contribution to this podcast. He was good to talk surfing with and, like a good shaper, he smoothed several rough edges. Good on you Byron.