One of the great advantages of the AfricanSurfer trip is that we made a bunch of cool friends up the coast of the African continent. One of the disadvantages is that as we sit working at our desks saving up for the next trip, we now get a regular stream of emails from them updating us as to how great the surf has been everywhere! The good news for you is that we’re happy to spread the envy around…

Sooo, this just in from our favourite Franco-Africaine surfer, Phillippe, residing in Republic of Congo:

“Voici qq tofs qui vont susciter, je n’en doute pas, certains commentaires.
Si vous êtes sages, et demandeurs, j’en ai qq superbes des potes. Avec qq tubes en prime ..”

Since after 13 months through largely francophone Africa, we still suck at French, we unfortunately can’t tell you exactly what he means except something about great mates and premium tubes! We’ll let the pictures do the talking instead…

Classic Central Afrique last week…

Phillippe casually turns through water as muddy as the access roads!
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On AfricanSurfer, we spent a week camped at the same spot thanks to the generous information from Phillippe, who is as local as they get, Patrique, who allowed us the use of his nearby shack, and Matt who kindly donated us some of his detailed oil company maps to help us navigate out of the jungle afterwards!

What these pictures don’t show is some of the stories around the place that we learnt before we went. The water is muddy thanks to the runoff from the mighty Congo river, approx 300kms south (and everything that comes out of that mighty river!). If that wasn’t enough to put you off, the local claim to have seen Hippo tracks on the beach (the spot is not far from the vicinity where the ocean-going ’surfing hippos’ were found by National Geographic), and a few years ago a hungry 7m-long crocodile was found on a nearby beach in Pointe Noire…

Needless to say our morning ’surf check’ subsequently also included a ‘croc-check’ and ‘hippo-check’!

Phillippe… hippo bait!

Franco-cutback… speed like this helps when you find yourself fleeing a local hazard!

Gastor and Zelo, who you may remember starred in the fliek we made HERE, and we wrote about HERE, are still around looking after visiting surfers!

(All photo’s in this post courtesy Phillippe – merci beaucoup!)

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In other news: mother ocean “snaps” at South Africa

We’ve heard it’s been a pretty crazy few weeks in Africa generally. The South African coast was last week hit by an absolute beast of a swell, causing widespread damage and prompting legendary SA surf forecaster Spike to call it it “the first time I have ever seen a swell with that interval in South Africa…”

On the morning of 1st September he described the extent of the storm on his SA surfing portal wavescape:

“If you had to draw a line from the tail of this behemoth, 100 miles off the Antarctic ice shelf, to the tip of its snarling snout, which ferociously snapped at Cape Point, you would draw for 2,000 nautical miles. That is 3,700 km of howling gale, part of which is an 800 km stretch that this morning packs winds of hurricane force to 64 knots. And all this pointed straight at us.”

(read more about the swell on wavescape here and catch some incredible pics here )

Could it possibly have been the same swell, Phillippe?

Phillippe meets another visitor from the Cape…