Everyone, it seems, is away at the moment, on a holiday or excursion of some sort. The Springboks are touring New Zealand, and learning to live with outdoor plumbing and no running water. The cricketers are playing assorted sides of South Africans, known as 'counties', apparently, and which also have a quota system (each team has to have at least one Englishman).

Carlos Alberto Parreira's gardener has gone back to Brazil to prop up his home economy, after guiding Bafana to the brink of missing the Cup of Nations. And if I can dodge the pile of work sitting in my rarely-frequented office, I too shall be taking a much-needed vacation: Jeffrey's Bay, here I come.

As a much-celebrated prodigy of the Mashonaland Country Districts junior surf team in Zimbabwe — I could take to a swimming pool with my surf board, and generally get out again without needing to be resuscitated — I feel a certain kinship with the crew who've wandered into J-Bay this week. Kelly Slater, Andy Irons, Mick Fanning, Taj Burrows, Jordy Smith, and the rest of the ASP Tour professionals who light up the world's finer breaks every week, have arrived for the Billabong Pro, and there aren't many good reasons for being anywhere else this week.

The Billabong Pro has cult status on the professional circuit, not least because of the near-mythical status of Supertubes, the impossibly perfect break that's a place of pilgrimage for every South African surfer, a shimmering, crashing surf temple that's drawn the 'hey bru, stoked' crowd for decades.

That crowd gets a little more high profile from tomorrow, Slater heading up the all-star cast that'll be dancing across the waves of J-Bay, gunning for a title that might not be the richest on tour, but which, thanks to the pedigree of champions past, is a sought-after addition to any surfer's CV.

Slater got into town a little late, having only made it out of Los Angeles on Monday night; that meant he missed the other big event this week.

Inspired as a tribute to one of the Billabong Pro's true greats, Mark Occhilupo, the surfers trooped down the road from J-Bay to St. Francis Bay, and Jack Nicklaus's gorgeous but brutal St. Francis Links, for the Billabong Pro-am — with the professionals in this case being the surfers.

I had to turn down an invitation through gritted teeth; St. Francis Links CEO Jeff Clause — the man who won bronze on the pommel horse for the United States at the '84 Games in LA before turning to golf, and heading out to South Africa — runs a splendid operation, and the chance to run wild on the course with the world's best surfers (and Golf Punk magazine's squad of bikini clad Bunker Babes) is as good an offer as I'll get this year.

Instead I spent a day fighting traffic in Johannesburg, while the surfing illuminati took on a challenge considerably tougher than the one beginning tomorrow — for the ASP stars, twelve-foot breaks are a lot easier when you're talking surfing rather than putting. But it did make for a fine salute to an Australian surfer who's done an awful lot to promote surfing in South Africa; tribute received, Occhilupo will now watch from the sidelines, as the surfing gets underway.

Ideally, Jordy Smith, who looks set to deliver on the enormous promise we've seen over the last few years, will pull off a home victory; Paul Botha, my inside man in the world of surfing (and comfortably the worst-dressed person in South Africa) reckons Jordy's an outside bet. But it's current rankings leader Kelly Slater who's the man to beat, the veteran having a stellar year thus far.

However, he does, though, and whoever wins, the simple fact that the world's greatest surfers are taking to one of the ocean's most naturally perfect breaks, is more than enough reason to ditch work and head to J-Bay.

Dunedin holds qualified promise without Smit, the Test match at Lord's is one of several, and you can visit Brazil whenever you want (particularly if you're being paid the GDP of Malawi every month to lose football matches). The Billabong Pro is just once a year, and with the line-up this year's event boasts, I know where I'd be headed. And quite probably will be; I'm long overdue a holiday.

  • Contact Dan at dan@metropolis.co.za


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