Giving Thanks

Thursday was Thanksgiving day in America and so it was Thanksgiving here on the North Shore too. Thanksgiving is possibly one of the nicest public holidays ever, because it is a whole day dedicated entirely to eating and drinking beer.

In fact, if you choose to opt out and surf the evening session instead, you’re recognized as someone who obviously is not liked enough to have been invited to a Thanksgiving feast and risk the fate of never being invited by anyone to anything ever again. So by 4PM the waves were empty, and stomachs were getting full.

This year, Thanksgiving arrived on one of the best days of weather of the winter – it was 27 degrees, and crystal clear. A happy, consistent 4 foot swell slid through, groomed by the soft offshore, and it was all about the Red, White and Blue.

We were sent to pick up some yams at Foodland at nine in the morning, as part of our contribution to our Thanksgiving lunch, hosted by the nicest man on the North Shore, Kai, who has all but adopted us. It was super festive at Foodland, kind of like Pick n Pay feels before a Springbok test match, except with Bruce Springsteen playing instead of Leon Schuster.

There we saw Pat O Connell and Rob Machado, packing their station wagons full of picnic food, and quietly sipping on beers. Pat is the quintessential happy American surfer dude - all smiles, all of the time - so he seemed as good a person as any to ask what yams are.

“Y’all from ‘Seff Efrika’ would call them sweet potatoes, 'broo',” he told us, before offering us a beer. We hadn’t had breakfast yet, and even The Mad Scientist hates drinking on an empty stomach, so we declined the generous offer.

“I’m going to a friends place for a barbeque, and to surf in front of his house for the day,” Pat told us, “Thanksgiving has to be the best day ever. You can’t think too much about surfing today, trust me.”

Now if anyone gives good advice, it must be Pat O Connell, so we focussed on eating for the day.

After a solid surf to work up an appetite at Sunset, we went round to Kai’s place and there we ate turkey, lamb, ham, corn, beans, yams, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, peach cobbler and drank lots of beer. Then we flopped around for an hour complaining that our stomachs were too full, when in reality we were just waiting for some digestion to go down to make room for seconds. Then we ate more. And so it went, on a hot Hawaiian Thanksgiving night as we ate and gave thanks.

We gave thanks for new friends, new adventures, great waves and good times in this far flung corner of the Pacific. We gave thanks for the fresh swell hitting this week, and for how lucky we are to be here. And we gave thanks that we live in South Africa: the most beautiful place on earth.