Jeffreys Bay
The right-hand point the whole surfing world knows, and a winter town that lives off it.
Welcome to Cape Town
Surfing in Cape Town
Cape Town answers the question Jeffreys Bay leaves open: where a beginner surfs, and what there is to do at six in the evening.
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Muizenberg is the learners' beach, a long sand bottom in False Bay with lefts and rights and nothing hard underneath. Its figures look like a warning and are not: in June, its best month, it is clean one day out of thirty and too small for twenty-seven. Too small is the whole point. That is the beach a school works every day of the year, and it is why the surf schools of an entire city sit within a few hundred metres of each other.
Kalk Bay Reef is five minutes down the same coast and something else entirely: a left and a right over reef, submerged rocks, and it rarely breaks. A spot to look at on the way past, not one to build a week around.
The water is the thing to know. False Bay is the warmer side of the peninsula and it is still cold: a 4/3 in winter and a full suit most of the year. Sharks are part of the conversation here and it is held in the open, with spotters watching from the hill above the beach and a flag anybody on the sand can read.
The evenings are why a week here turns into two. A city with a mountain behind it, restaurants that do not close at nine, and the vineyards an hour away.
Welcome home.
Why Cape Town?
The beginner coast, with a city attached
Nothing in False Bay will give an experienced surfer the week Jeffreys Bay gives them. That is not the trade on offer. What is on offer is a beach that gets somebody standing in three days, a peninsula whose other side has a different swell window twenty minutes away when this one is flat, and a city that fills the other twenty-two hours.
Where is Cape Town?
Getting there
Muizenberg is twenty-five minutes from the centre of Cape Town by car and on the same suburban railway line, which is unusual for a surf beach: you can stay in town and still be in the water before work. The airport is forty minutes away.
Best surf spots in Cape Town
See all spotsSurf camps in Cape Town
See all surf campsNo surf camp listed yet for this destination.
Other surf zones nearby
Durban
Warm water all year on the Indian Ocean side, and the season that runs when the rest of the country is flat.
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