Photos and footage simply can’t convey the majestic scope of that headland. It’s not like Jeffrey’s is a point break; it’s actually a gargantuan peninsula with a series of six point breaks strewn along it, like precious stones in a necklace. If you start at the final break before it hits the beach to the west– Albatross – and start driving southeast along the headland, you drive at 50kmh for at least five minutes, passing The Point, Tubes, Impossibles, and Supertubes before you hit the last break, Boneyards. Even then, there’s a big cove and another break, Magnatubes.
Another thing is that it takes a while before you start to differentiate one break from the next. When I first showed up there in1993, jetlagged and spun out, it presented as a confusing set of endless, four-to-six-foot corduroy lines. I had no idea what was going on whatsoever, and paddled out some where in the middle of what turned out to be Impossibles, the lightning fast
Section after Supertubes. The first guy I nodded a “hello” to blew up:
“I can’t believe you’re greeting me!” he spat in a vicious Afrikaans accent, and looked like he might punch me.
What the fuck?
Bewildered, I skulked away, drifting off down the line past Tubes, and ended upat The Point, the penultimate break and a fairly obvious lineup due to its cove. There were only two groms out and I had quite a good surf, the wave being a fun and rippable South African version of Crescent Head.
As I found out in the first five minutes of my first surf, the locals aren’t real friendly.I worked out pretty quickly that the best idea was to avoid Supertubes whenever possible, as that’s where the alpha arseholes gathered in their sphinctural glory. It’s a shame, because Supertubes is by far the best wave there, and is invariably the one people see when they come across a photo of ‘J-Bay’. By chance though, it turned out that the sand dependent Albatross, the last hurrah before the long beach stretching north towards Port Elizabeth, happened to have all time banks, as I was later informed.That became my go to, and I generally surfed either there or The Point, with an odd mission to Supertubes when it was six-foot plus, consistent, and simply too good to pass up. I had numerous sessions at Albatross with only a couple of guys out, the perfect number (solo sessions in SouthAfrica aren’t very comfortable).
Of course, there are lots of plusses. It is consistent, cheap, and feels like an alternative universe version of Australia. The weed is plentiful and potent, and costs about a quarter of the exorbitant price it goes for in Australia. The real estate is even cheaper, and you could do worse than posting up there, cranky locals and all.
