The Great Tabelini
media courtesy of Mike Tabeling
by Mike Tabeling
posted 2004-03-15

‹ | 1 2 3 4 | ›

At that time in surfing history, boards began getting shorter thanks to fantastically innovative Aussies like Nat Young, Bob McTavish, Wayne Lynch, and Midget Farrelly. The entire world of surfing was experiencing a metamorphosis at that moment. It was a movement into a more radical, slash and tear type of expression. But as always happens, there was also a backlash at that time, with a minority of surfers holding on to the old school philosophy. At the Duke contest in Hawaii that year Buzzy Trent and Ryan Dotson nearly came to blows on the beach over which style was better. I knew that short board surfing was for me. That was my direction. But the repercussion of the new school surfers at the time really had a negative effect on the surfing population in general because for the next twenty years it wasn't acceptable to ride the longboards. If you rode one you were branded a kook. Most of them disappeared into attics or were cut down to make shortboards. Thousands of surfers quit the sport. It just wasn't fun for them anymore. Today all that is different and longboard surfers have returned with delight, entire families enjoying the wave riding experience.

Something else happened around that time that had a huge influence on the sport. There was debate about who was actually the best surfer. Was it the guy who won the contests, or was it the soulful free surfer? The battle cry was propagated by the media and since I'd already satisfied any craving I had to prove myself in competition, I followed the latter philosophy and quit surfing contests all together. It sounds pretty cut and dry now when I say it like that, but there was much more to it then.

It was the early seventies and I'd been surfing the Sunset Cliffs with Larry Gephardt, Steve Lis, Snow White and the crew and they got me hooked on Stevie's radical fish designs. Today anything that has a swallowtail can be called a fish, but back then a fish was a fish. It was basically a wide swallow twin fin kneeboard that was ridden standing up. The average lengths were less than 5'6"; mine was 5'2". They performed like no other board I'd ever ridden and there was simply no way to compare fish surfing to any other regular board at that time. It strongly reinforced my decision to quit contest surfing.

Gephardt had a board with fins glassed onto the tail rails. They were about three inches long and shaped like small keels placed where we have wings on boards today. I'd never seen or heard about anything like that and was so impressed that I copied the design and put them on my next Weber board. That summer I took the board to France and rode it all season. I showed the design to Gerry Lopez who was there that year. He studied it and scratched his chin. I'm not sure he knew what to make of it because he never rode my board, but by the next winter wings were being shaped into boards by Dick Brewer in Hawaii and not glassed on like mine were. I never got to ask Gerry if there was any connection.

Since I was getting paid to surf by Dewey Weber I decided to take my weekly check and continue traveling around the world. My partner in these nefarious adventures was Bruce Valluzzi, my brother in surfing. He was a great Floridian surfer and international traveler. Over a period of years we explored and discovered un-surfed classic spots in France, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco; doing the same things that others like Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson were doing. It's just that we didn't have the camera or even care about recording it for the rest of the world. It was precious enough for us just being there and doing it alone. All we took away were memories. That's how we felt back then but it was utterly idiotic in retrospect. I wish now that we had documented what we saw.

In that era of the early 70's we also traveled to Australia, South Africa, and South America.

Soon after that I met Alice. She became my traveling partner and wife. And we set out on the road for years on end. Eventually we went through South Africa in 1992, for four months, and fell totally in love with the place and had to finally settle in there.

You can only imagine what it was like in the early years in that part of the Southern Hemisphere, with farms stretching right down to the sea, very few people, and there seemed to be unbelievable surf everywhere. The crowning jewels being Jeffrey's Bay and Cape St. Francis, which are really only a few miles apart. Back then the drive between the two spots took from forty-five minutes to an hour depending on the condition of the roads. Occasionally they were only navigable by four-wheel drives, which stopped most surfers from getting between the two places. Imagine riding one of the most perfect waves on earth and not seeing another surfer. It happened a lot.

Our infatuation with Africa grew and after we were married in 1975 we went back for a ten-month extended honeymoon. Things change slowly there but it was happening. Jeffreys had become the artsy bohemian Laguna Beach of South Africa. Artisans were everywhere making crafts, sandals, and clothes. One gal we met on that trip was Cheron Habib. We'd become good friends hanging out with her for hours, drinking tea and eating Marmite toast while she'd sew individual surf-trunks by hand. We couldn't have guessed it then but Cheron became the queen bee of the town and is now J-Bay's largest employer. At one time she owned every surf shop in the town and with her stunning house at Supertubes she's certainly earned her title.

When I think about the nine years I lived in Jeffreys Bay with my family one name comes to mind that is synonymous with the place and that's Tony Van Den Heuvel known fondly by his friends as Tony Van. He was South Africa's first Shaun Tomson. I met him in 1965 on the same trip that Greg Noll almost got me killed. International contestants were there for what was the precursor to a first World Surfing Contest and the one thing everyone was talking about was how magically Tony rode small waves. He'd taken hot dogging to a new level blowing minds with gymnastic ballets and power tricks. He worked his board frontward, backwards, sideways, upside down and never seemed to fall. Remember this was before leashes, and the Peruvian breaks that I first saw him surf on were a long paddle out. I'd never seen anyone surf like him before, not even in the movies. I still consider him to be one of the greatest influences in my early contest surfing career. He worked with leather and many famous surfers who came to surf Supertubes left with a pair of his shoes and a memory of his smiling face. He's with God now and I miss him.

‹ | 1 2 3 4 | ›