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

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Tony was always on a low budget and lived in a hundred different places; open-air garages, tents, trailers and mansions. During his thirty plus years in the land of perfect waves many of his countrymen came to visit him. Some only stayed a short time while others remained permanently. On one trip to Jeffreys Tony introduced me to his new roommate "Chemical" Clive. Curious about this guy's name I waited until I was alone with Tony to asked him about it. He told me that Clive was the kind of guy that would take anything if it were offered to him even if no one knew the dosage. He was an animal. Tony told me about a party in a plush Cape Town suburb where Clive found his way into the master bathroom and decided to do an inspection of the medicine cabinet. He found some unfamiliar but large pills that he popped in his mouth and choked them down with the rest of his beer. Sufficiently drunk already, he walked back to the living room to socialize and wait for the pills to take affect but by the time he got there he began throwing up and curiously foaming at the mouth. Of course the hostess was concerned, and not just about the mess he was making everywhere, but by the bubbles coming out. Clive confessed to pinching some pills from the medicine cabinet and described them to her. She shook her head and told him he'd just eaten her suppositories. So from that day on he was known as "Chemical" Clive.

From the mid seventies until the late eighties I built Tabeling Surfboards. And in the 80's the business marked an end to my super long world surfing trips due to the responsibilities of my family and work. I missed those days but still continued traveling finding that the "stays" were much shorter. Then something happened that shook up my whole life. My two closest friends died within seven days of each other. They were Bruce Valluzzi who I'd respected from the day I started surfing and traveled the world for so many years with and David Smith who I did all my treasure hunting with, finding hundreds of Spanish coins, artifacts, and a cannon.

These were great guys and we had many great stories. I remember one with Dave.

With our cars hidden and under the cover of a black stormy night Dave and I were treasure hunting at a secret spot near Sebastian Inlet. There was huge ocean swell, and it had caused severe beach erosion. A perfect catalyst to expose coins, which had been buried in the dunes since a Spanish galleon, had washed ashore during a hurricane in 1715.

To protect our spot from other hunters we only turned our flashlights on when we were digging up coins. Because we wore headphones and our attention was always focused downward there was always the fear that someone could sneak up on one of us in the dark, smack us over the head, and steal our valuable booty. The gale force wind would occasionally blow a huge chunk of sea foam by my face like a fleeting ghost scaring the crap out of me.

Dave and I separated so we wouldn't be going over the same area. We'd been apart for about a half hour when he came running up to me. He found something he had to show me but was afraid to touch it. I curiously followed him back to the spot and he pointed to a football sized object sticking out of the sand dune. I shined my light on it and assured myself it wasn't metal treasure. Upon closer inspection I discovered that Dave had found a human skull. This could have been the end of our secret treasure hunting spot because the police would surely ask us what we were doing on this secluded stretch of beach at two in the morning. I dislodged the head and inspected it closer. The lower jaw was missing and I noticed that all the teeth in the upper half were sanded smooth almost down to where the gum line must have been. It was then I knew we'd found the remains a beach living, shellfish eating, Florida Indian. Dave hid the skull in the dune and we continued hunting treasure until just before light. The next day Dave went back and retrieved the prize for a souvenir. It wasn't until Dave passed away a few years later that his wife had scary thoughts that the skull might have brought bad luck to the person who moved it so she returned to the place we found it and reburied it.

Yes, I'd lost two friends who died in the prime of their lives. It reminded me of my own fragile vulnerability and decided that I would follow my dreams to the fullest because my day could come as easily as it did to my best buddies. It was absolutely the sole reason that I decided to move my whole family to South Africa while I could still do it. That's how it happened and why I was so blessed to move half way around the world to live in my dream surf spot. I started surfing contests again there and became the South African shortboard champ in 1992 and the short and longboard champs in 1992.

I built a three story home smack dab in the middle of Surfers Point near a section of Supertubes named Impossibles. I called our home the "Impossibles Dream". Because of its location I was inundated with friends who came to town and rented the vacation flat I'd built over the garage. It was especially advantageous to the pros that came to surf the Billabong contest each year because we were close enough to hear the horns separating the heats.

When the waves were flat or blown out I'd always make sure that my guests got to see wild things, stuff they'd never do in America. One young surfer who stayed with us each year and loved going on my "Yankee Tours" was Kelly Slater. Unfortunately, as one of our jaunts unfolded it turned out that I might have killed him. How would you like to be the guy who killed Kelly even if it was an accident? You'd be the most hated surfer on the planet and go down in history with your name associated with others like Mark Chapman, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. That could have been me.

Kelly and his roommate, California Mark, decided not to see the elephants in Addo that day because if we went the other direction we could see three times as many things. The three of us piled into my Mercedes and at the crack of dawn we were off to Oudtshorn. The boys got to ride ostriches, spelunk caves, check the crocodiles, and pet the cheetahs. It was well after dark when we finally left for home and began the three-hour drive back through the Karoo, a very inhospitable part of the country, truly in the middle of nowhere. As we drove along I noticed that our headlights were dimming and realized that the alternator wasn't charging the battery. Luckily my car was a diesel that runs on magnetos. As long as I kept the engine running I didn't need a battery at all. Over the next few minutes the beams faded to nearly nothing. It was then that we slowed the car and tried to access what kind of a predicament we were truly in. None of us were mechanics or electricians and didn't have a clue about the alternator. I stopped to check the wires to see if one had fallen off but that was all we could do. If I turned off the headlights for a few minutes they came back on brighter but that didn't help because they quickly faded again.

To make matters worse the sky was totally overcast and because of the isolation here there was not one drop of artificial light anywhere. The visibility was zero like being in a cave. Mark was standing up through the sunroof and Kelly was leaning out the window. The conditions were so out of control that neither one could see the white lines until they passed by the car. As soon as I got going over fifteen miles per hour I found out that my navigators couldn't keep me in a straight line and I'd end up going off the road onto the shoulder. That could be a deadly mistake because it's never guaranteed that there would be one. Worse than that we could spook a buck and hit it with the car wiping out one of my guides at the same time. The local Kudu is twice the size of a cow and stands at a height that if you hit one head-on you break all four of its legs and the torso comes straight through the front window. Kudu accidents are frequent in the Karoo and there are hundreds of deadly stories to prove it. Just ask any South African. Signs are posted everywhere warning about it.

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