At The Beach
All that glitters ain’t silver but is still precious
I love what Mandy Uys has to say: The “ocean is like Narnia for me. With my friends I step through the car door and into another world. Magic. 5th dimension. Mermaids, dolphins, stingrays, jellies, ships, shipwrecks ...”
The back of Nahoon Reef is Narnia for Peter Hoeland too every time he walks
— his dogs Meinu and Jelly, his eyes are gently scanning the sand for magic stones. I call it fools silver, Peter tells
He just can t resist the interesting twinkle of the soft graphite stones washed up in the dull shingle.
Peter has been collecting graphite for a long time and he uses it to decorate his pot plants. He is a keen gardener when not at the beach.
Peter, 53, is the adopted son of the late, great, famous Erik of erstwhile Erik s Delicatessen.
I grew up in Irvine Road, just off Beach Road in Nahoon, East London, so the demise of Erik s Deli feels like a part of my life went missing.
More so for Peter he ran the deli for 17 — years but found that 24-hour garage conveniences and late-hour grocery chain stores just made business too tough and rental and property ownership more attractive.
Erik was a tough cookie and he gave Peter hard yards about surfing.
Riding waves was for bums and dropouts, so when Peter s grades took a bit of a dip, whamo, it was off to boarding school in King William s Town.
Life in PE and two years in the army also did not contribute well to a promising surfing career.
Stay positive and keep smiling,” Peter tells me is his secret to happiness.
Time in the dry dock did not dim his enthusiasm though.
Along with good friend Ed Pienke, Peter got his mojo back and today his favourite surfboard is a Des Sawyer 9 0 longboard.
This board once belonged to Allen Harris.
The board was shaped and made in Jeffreys Bay when Allen was living in East London and good friend Craig Cuff was living close by in PE.
Craig visited Des while the board was being created, which is why under the glass, written on the bottom deck of Allen s board it says Craig Cuff is my hero QBay rules
This is a lot of history and cheek in one surfboard.
Of history, I have just finished reading Alan Jefferies The Absolute Border, about Kei Mouth.
The author pens a fine quote from an unidentified source:
Nothing dignifies a man more than “learning, and no learning makes a man more sensible than history. That gives him an anticipation of time, and brings experience without grey hairs, and makes us wise at the cost of others.”
Peter tells me he is reading about five books at the moment and his favourite slant is history.
Bernard Cromwell s The Journey weaves a narrative of fiction through historic events and is Peter s current most enjoyable read.
He was kind enough to lend me his copy of Fighting and Fun at Nahoon by Glenn Hollands.
I found the book a bit too politically slanted for my taste but the history of some of our shipwrecks is fascinating.
Surfer raconteur Julian Bray tells me he has read up on about 150 wrecks on our coast from Nahoon Mouth to Eastern Beach and he picks up graphite, coal pebbles, pottery pieces and such along our coastline.
The interesting pewter-coloured graphite pebbles are a wonder to behold and it perplexes me whether they are a natural event or attached to a shipwreck.
I am long overdue for goggles, snorkel and some head under water looking for wreckage and some lost underwater anchor chains again.
Mandy is correct, the ocean is like Narnia. I am sure Peter Hoeland agrees.
Surfer raconteur Julian Bray tells me he has read up on about 150 wrecks on our coast from Nahoon Mouth to Eastern Beach and he picks up graphite, coal pebbles, pottery pieces and such along our coastline