Healthy Living in St Francis Welcome to The Pound A new concept in fitness Stranded abroad over lockdown Stuck at Supersuck Issue 1 September 2020 Photo: @gumboot.camera What’s Inside West Wind West Wind ......................................................................................3 The Pound.......................................................................................4 Kouga Municipality Co-Sponsors The Rip Curl E-Pro ......................8 News from St Francis Property Owners Association .....................12 Happy Birthday St Francis College.................................................15 Arterial Roads Resurfacing............................................................18 News From The Joint Kromme River Committee..........................19 Bruce’s Museum & Cafe................................................................20 New Dates Confirmed For Wine On Water Festival In St Francis..21 Healthy Living In St Francis Bay.....................................................23 Runners, Swimmers and Water Groms.........................................25 Souls Of St Francis.........................................................................28 Update From The Rotary Club Of St Francis .................................31 Stuck at Supersuck ....................................................................... 33 Update from the St Francis Property Owners ..............................39 West Wind Hi and welcome to issue one of The West Wind, a new local St Francis publication. Our team consists of Craig Jarvis and St Francis Today. Small beginnings, but we hope you enjoy it. Our new digital magazine hopes to entertain, and inform. We aim to cover the greater St Francis area, Oyster Bay, Humansdorp and JBay so feel free to mail us to let us know what you think, if you have any advice, or if you want to have something in particular published or mentioned. We are dedicated to keeping things fairly light, and we’re not into negativity. How could we be negative anyway, now that the beaches are open, the bottle stores are trading and those that want to smoke can do so, just as long as they throw their stompies away. We have had some great new developments in Cape St Francis with The Pound, Haydn Holmes’ new ‘gym’ of sorts at the CBD. Next up is Faye Zoetmulder and Ari Kraak’s new Coastal Collective food store and eatery. You can find out more about those two developments inside. The St Francis Property Owners (SFPO) and the NPC continue to do great things for St Francis Bay, and were involved on the ground when the spit breached last month as well as this month. Hopefully they can get the long term coastal protection scheme in play as soon as possible. The project’s kick-off is absolutely crucial, because the spit is extremely vulnerable and something has to be done. One of our most lauded surfers, Dale Staples from St Francis Bay was the inaugural winner of South Africa’s first online surfing event. He won the men’s division while Sophie Bell from Salt Rock in KZN won the ladies division. Although the beaches are open, there will be no surf events this year, and who knows what will happen next year. Talking of next year, maybe Cape St Francis local Julian Werts will make it back by then. Julian. is an American but has been living in Seals for close on 20 years now, so is as local as they come, despite his American twang. He has been stuck on Lombok and in Bali for months. Read all about his adventures in ‘Stuck at Supersuck’ inside. CONTACT INFORMATION: Craig - 082 376 4443 - eMail: [email protected] Colin - 082 554 0796 - e-Mail: [email protected] The Pound A new gym in town Alongside the Liquid Lines training pool sits a new build- ing, called The Pound. It’s a gym, but like no other. The gym founder is Haydn Holmes, and he envisaged some- thing new when he started developing his new training space. We reached out to Haydn, to chat to him about The Pound. Interview by Craig Jarvis CJ: This something new and exciting, but it’s not really a gym as we know it. What is it? HH: The Pound was created as an anti-gym. We wanted to create a space that, in our opinion, accommodated a water people/ ocean culture. We wanted to create a space that allowed like-minded people to come together and get active in ways which support their choice of living at the coast. This is a place that has Chester- field couches, Persian carpets but has assassins on the floor. It has beauty and nostalgia but ruthlessly efficient workout methods. CJ: The Pound. Where does the name come from, and what does it mean? HH: We are slightly off-kilter but no less fun. The beauty of being local is that while many familiar landmarks or surf breaks become synonymous with the area, they tend to be branded around frivolously by all and sundry. The Pound is proof that not everyone knows everything about this paradise, and it is an exam- ple of what living here means. It’s a surf break that locals cherish. The Pound is the antithesis of Full Stop. ‘Nuff said. CJ: What is the gym philosophy and ethos? HH: We are first and foremost about the community. The space is less to do with selfies and self-indulgence and more to do with salt-of-the-earth genuine souls. We want people with a balanced approach to work, play and healthy living. Train hard and play hard. This is a space that wants you to learn and have an immersive experience. This is a space with beer on tap and art on the walls. There are an ice bath and a sauna. This is a space where those who use it become the custodians of the ocean cul- ture of which we are proud to be a part of. So if you’re lekker and want to hang with some balanced locals, pull in. We’d love to learn from you and hopefully we can teach you a few things too. Kouga Municipality Co-Sponsors The Rip Curl E-Pro St Francis Surfer Wins The Men’s Competition When beaches were closed and no sports events allowed, surfing in South Africa was looking pretty gloomy. The World Surf League cancelled the Ballito Pro in Dur- ban and the JBay Open in Jeffreys Bay. The SA Champs was cancelled in JBay, along with the Billabong Junior Series event that runs every year in Seal Point. Surf Web Series is a surf media company based in Mexico City. They ran an online surf event for the Mexican surfers, and it was a great success. In a nutshell, surfers send in videos of themselves surfing, and these videos are packaged in groups of four and ‘skinned’ to make them look like a surf heat. Then the heats are run off as a usual surf contest, all the way through to a final—a virtual surfing competition. When the word was put out, Rip Curl South Africa liked what they saw, and spon- sored the event. Shaka Surf, an online surf store that makes surfboard fins from recycled bottle caps came on board as a presenting sponsor, and Red Bull put up a prize for the Best Tube Ride to the tune of R10,000. Oakley also joined in and of- fered R10,000 worth of eyewear to the winners and to the videographers. So the deal was R10,000 for first prize and R5,000 for the second prize—a mixed competition where women surfed against men. The Kouga Municipality has always always supported surfing and when they found out about the event they felt it would be an excellent opportunity to reward the women surfers during Women’s Month in South Africa. So they decided to sponsor a standalone women’s event, with equal prize money. Their reasoning was that Kouga has such great waves in JBay and Cape St Francis and also have such good surfers, that they will most definitely have a significant presence in the event. Their reasoning was correct. The event secured entries from JBay surfers Steven Sawyer, Dylan Lightfoot, Ari Kraak, and Dan Thornton, as well as St Francis locals Nate Plomaritis, Billy Payne and Matt Davis. PE surfers and brothers Miles, Ollie and Duncan Boucher entered, as well as Joshe Faulkner from JBay and Don Zoetmulder from Port Elizabeth. Then there was Kai Woolf from JBay and Faye Zoetmulder from St Francis in the women’s contest. That is a lot of surfing talent from the Kouga area. The waves from the Kouga area are always going to show up on video contests and online surf events. They are that good. The event was hosted on Instagram on the @surfwebseries, and it got terrific engagement. So much so that Robin De Kock, the general manager of Surfing South Africa - the governing body of the sport in South Africa – acknowledged the event and agreed to support and help along the way. His help was much appreciated as the 32 surfers grew to 56 and then to 60 surfers, and the first 200 video clips starting arriving. That was just the beginning. Then the organisers realised how much video content was moving around. It was being sent by contestants, downloaded to the organiser’s machines and then uploaded to the Surf Web Series servers,. So TCS WiFI came on board. They offered to rig the Surf Web Series offices in Cape St Francis Bay with super fast and efficient internet. It was a massive help in the logistics of the event. Wavescape.co.za came on board as the media partner, and we had an event. Staples in action © Van Gysen The Rip Curl E-Pro Cont from page 9 In the end it was Dale Staples, originally from St Francis Bay who won the men’s event as well as taking out the Red Bull Best Tube for a massive barrel on the West Coast and pocketed R20,000 with R10,000 for each prize.