I met The Oom once, shortly before he died. We were five guys who’d been living in a van for two-and-a-half months, travelling in Namibia, so we were super-feral, and, heading down to Cape Town, we stopped in Elands Bay, where we spent four days waiting for a storm to pass, the wind to turn, the waves to come.
Sitting on the beach, we saw this Caravelle pull up, and this guy got out of the driver’s side, ran around to open the sliding door. First, we saw his passenger’s beard, then his head. The surf was crappy, all on shore, a mess, but as soon as his foot hit the sand, this perfect wave peeled down the point, just one. The passenger was The Oom, the first to surf…
