big waves

On Sunday, 4 March 2007, Gavin Searle sent me an email.  “Give me a call,” he said, “some guys got properly taken out on the Mound yesterday.  Today was cleaner – we got up to 37km/h down the face of a monster.”

“Huh?” I thought, “What’s the Mound?”

Someone posted a link on the yahoogroups surfski newsgroup a couple of days ago.  It simply said, "rough stuff" and gave the link: http://www.harvpix.com.

We checked it out to find a series of great shots of surf skis going out through some mean surf...

The "surf ski rocketing down huge wave" photo posted earlier on surfski.info sparked plenty of interest. Here's the story behind the shot.

It was taken in 2004 on a Big Day at Dungeons outside Hout Bay here in Cape Town. Someone at SA Paddler magazine thought it might be interesting to take some photos of surf skis catching runs at Dungeons, and looked around for some truly insane paddlers to take up the challenge. Four intrepid surf skiers answered the call: Greg Bertish, Richard Kohler, Richard Sutton and Johann van Blerck.

Oh, and the photographer was in a little 15ft aluminum "tinny" with a 15hp outboard... No rubber duck or jetski; just a fast ski boat as a makeshift rescue craft.

Does anyone know the origin of this photo, who took it and where? I found it on www.purepaddling.com but no details are given. - Alain Jaques.

[Rob 15/02/2006: we've now got the full story behind this photo - and we've got some new shots too.  Check out for the article, click here. Comments from Richard Kohler and Greg Bertish who actually caught some of the monster waves at Dungeons.  This photo shows Greg Bertish taking off on a wave.]