This past Sun my friend Darryn and I drove out to Surfer’s Corner in Muizenburg to check out the 5th annual BOS Earthwave Beach Festival.  It was a 2 day affair taking place on the 29th & 30th Sep, sponsored by (as the name would suggest) BOS Ice Tea, and festival activities included some inter-schools,  longboard & tandem surfing championships, environmental awareness talks & presentations, beach touch rugby, a SUP & Surfski race to Kalk Bay and back, a treasure hunt, free surf lessons, lots of giveaways and two Guinnes World Record attempts.  The first (which took place on the Sat) was an attempt to create the longest line of surboards on a beach.  They were able to rustle up 68 surfboards to create a line of just over 191m long.  But this was sadly still way below the world record which was 515m – a record set in California in 2011.  The second (which took place of the Sun) was to get the most surfers riding the same wave.  It was that second one I was most intrigued by…

Now I missed the Sat activities because well it was freakin’ miserable outside and there was no way in hell I was going to brave the cold and go sit on a beach.  But luckily on Sun the weather cleared nicely and it turned out to be the perfect day to attempt that surfing record.

They had almost 400 surfers who registered to take part and to beat the record they needed to top 110 surfers all on the same wave.  This is the current world record which was actually set on this exact same beach back in 2009.  Right, sounds simple enough. Right? 

Before we get to the details of what went down, I have to give a special mention to this T-shirt awesomeness:

A WWF T-shirt (that’s World Wildlife Fund and not the World Wrestling Federation. hehe) I’m obsessed with pandas, hence my immediate love for this shirt.

OK, back to the surfers and that world record.  Turns out trying to manage almost 400 surfers, get them into a straight line and then get them to sit around and wait for the perfect wave, is quite a tough job.  Who woulda thought?  I mean with surfers having such long attention spans and all that.   But they only had only one hour to get it done, so surfer & MC, Dene Botha, had a bit of an uphill battle on his hands.

This is what 400 surfers in the water looks like:

Chaos…

But somehow they managed to get them into straight line:

Impressive stuff

There were a few false starts… obviously some guys just got way too excited when they saw a wave or didn’t quite hear Dene’s queues…

No guys! Not now! They said the 3rd wave… the 3rd wave!!!! Aaarrgggh…

But they got it together in the end and had a few promising attempts, especially the very last one where I thought for sure they had gotten more than the needed 110.Sadly, official auditing of the photographs proved that they only got 84 surfers.  So they were just a little short.  But hell, it was still a pretty insane thing to witness.

Celebrations moved on to the Brass Bell, but we didn’t stick around for that because we had big plans to watch some friends die in the new Judge Dredd movie (it was shot here and some of my friends were part of the stunt crew).  So you have to understand, watching your friends get their butts kicked on the big screen totally beats out drinks at the Bell.  As much as I love that place.

But ja, great effort from everyone involved.  I’ll definitely keep an eye out for this one again next year.  We can do it guys!  At least the record still belongs to Cape Town for now.

xxx