The Story of Jeffreys Bay, South Africa
Jeffreys Bay is the world’s reference right-hand point: a ladder of named sections peeling down a sand-draped rock point on South Africa’s Eastern Cape, with Supertubes — one of the fastest, most perfectly tapered walls on the planet — at its heart. A trading-store town from 1849 and a quiet fishing village into the 1950s, it was first surfed by a crew of Cape Town surfers in 1964 and has been the sport’s winter pilgrimage ever since.
The Bay of Saint Francis
Portuguese navigators named this whole sweep of coast the Bahia de São Francisco in 1575, and its surf legend began at the far corner: Bruce Brown filmed “the perfect wave” for The Endless Summer at Cape St Francis, thirty kilometers down the coast. When that wave proved fickle, the surf press pointed the world at the longer, far more consistent point up the bay — Jeffreys. The machinery is Southern Ocean winter: cold fronts riding the Roaring Forties hurl south-southwest groundswell at the point from May through September, and the same passing fronts swing the wind west-southwest — dead offshore down the line.
A Ladder of Sections
The point reads like a menu, top to bottom: Kitchen Windows for the groms, heavy Magna Tubes, shallow Boneyards, then Supertubes — roughly three hundred meters of reeling, barreling wall — into Impossibles, Tubes, the mellower Point, and finally soft Albatross at the far end of town. On the rare swell that lines up evenly, Boneyards connects through to the Point for rides of over a kilometer. It all breaks over sand laid across rock, which is why the dunes behind the beach matter: the Supertubes Surfing Foundation has spent decades protecting the last of them, planting thousands of rescued aloes and maintaining the boardwalks where the town gathers to watch. The wildlife shares the lineup — pods of dolphins surf the point in formation, and southern right whales pass close inshore through the winter.
Supertubes
The contest story started small — a hotel-sponsored classic in 1981 — and was carried onto the world tour in 1984 by Cheron Kraak, the Country Feeling founder who built Billabong South Africa from a J-Bay sewing room and became the matron saint of the town’s surf economy. From 1996 the Billabong Pro made Supertubes a fixture of the championship tour: Kelly Slater and Mick Fanning won four titles here apiece, Derek Hynd made it the theater for his finless experiments, and on July 19, 2015 the world watched Fanning fight off a great white in the final — then come back and win the whole event in 2016. The tour last visited in July 2025, when Gabriela Bryan and Connor O’Leary took the Corona Cero Open; as of 2026 J-Bay is off the tour calendar, which changes nothing about the wave. Paddle out through the keyhole in front of the takeoff if you belong there; otherwise the boardwalk at the end of Pepper Street is the best seat in surfing, an hour’s drive from the Gqeberha airport.