The Surfers Journal
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The beach has turned into a burning-hot gauntlet that stretches from the mangroves behind us to the edge of the sea. The waves look perfect from a distance, peeling beyond the sunbaked sand. Up close, however, they are wild and unpredictable, loping off at breakneck speed. A cyclone in the Mozambique Channel has stirred the ocean to life, funneling its energy directly toward shore. Muddy swirls of water bloom in patches along the mile-long sandbank, making the lineup even more difficult to navigate as the tide drains.
Mikey February is deep up the point when a set approaches. He lets the first band of swell pass underneath him. The second has a slightly different bend as it draws water off the bank. February paddles hard, then slides to his feet. The wave threatens to race off, and he starts pumping, his outside arm swinging rhythmically.
The unorthodox motion propels him out of the barrel and into the next section, where he stalls, then releases the weight on his back foot and leans forward as the wave swallows him whole. After a moment, he exits the tube and is catapulted into a deep bottom turn that he redirects mid-face.
The wave has nearly doubled in size by now, and his two fins momentarily disengage, the board hovering in midair as the bottom drops out and he becomes weightless, floating. The transition lasts only a split second before the fins reconnect and board, rider, and wave come together in a fluid burst of speed. Then he’s gone again, locked inside the thick closeout section that has been plaguing surfers all day, only to reemerge moments later through the doggy door. He tries to brace himself as the lip explodes onto the back of his board and bucks him off.
Exhausted, he bellies up to the sand.
“I was waiting for one of those all day,” he says. “It’s super fast, but every now and again a bigger one comes along and runs down the bank. It’s nice to surf a right like this,” he adds, referring to the frigid lefts of Skeleton Bay that lie almost directly across the continent.
Over the past five years, February has become synonymous with surfing in Africa— initially when he qualified for the world tour in 2018, then exploding globally for his freesurfing on alternative craft, from J-Bay to Ghana and beyond. When he caught wind of this swell, he’d been wintering on the North Shore with his wife, Zelti, and their young son, Myles. The prospect of riding this elusive wave was more than enough motivation for him to make the long trip home when he saw the charts.
“It’s amazing that I get to do this and share it with them,” he says before jogging up the point for one more.
Kuilsriver is far removed from the tropical idylls of Hawaii and Mozambique. Historically a conservative farming community, the suburb is located on the outskirts of Cape Town in South Africa. To the south lies the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, a sea of corrugated iron shacks that stops abruptly at the N2 national highway. Heading north from there, the landscape turns into a patchwork of industrial parks and farmland before melting into the green vineyards of Stellenbosch, renowned for its wines and wealth.
Kuilsriver lies wedged in between these worlds and is where February’s father, Isaac, grew up. “My mom was a nurse and my dad was a market farmer,” says Isaac. “He was sort of missing in my life when I was little, so I grew up with my mom and she was my everything, my role model.”
Although he recently turned 59, Isaac’s age is indiscernible. Tall and broad-shouldered, the only physical sign that he may be anywhere near middle age is the white stubble in his soul patch. It’s a crisp spring morning as he leads me through the double garage of his home in Kommetjie. A 1970s cream-colored Ford Cortina sedan sits parked over to one side, immaculately restored down to the gleaming vinyl seats. We pass an assortment of cases and lockboxes that lie stacked on top of each other, giving way to shelves lined with neatly ordered tools, silicone guns, and calipers. A collection of surfboards lines the far wall, bookended by a duo of vintage fridges. A welding torch and mask hang on a hook nearby. “I’ve got a lot of side hustles going on,” Isaac jokes as we step into the main house.
Before moving to Kuilsriver with his mother all those years ago, Isaac lived with his family in the rural district of Groot Drakenstein. “Most people from our community were farm workers or worked in the canning and packing factories,” he says. “We weren’t ocean people. Growing up, my friends and I had no idea about surfing. Everybody played rugby. I was always terrible at it. When we moved to Kuilsriver, everybody played soccer, and I was terrible at that, too!”
The move did, however, bring him closer to the city—and the coastline that surrounds the Cape Peninsula. “I was about 16 when I made friends with a skateboarder, Arnie,” he recalls. “He worked at Surf Centre in the City Bowl, and I’d spend most of my free time hanging out at the store with him.”
Owned by Dave “Lippie” Lipschitz, Surf Centre was a core bastion of the South African surf scene in the 1980s. Lipschitz’s towering frame was matched by a booming, larger-than-life personality that could be intimidating, but beneath his grizzly exterior lay a generous spirit who encouraged anyone interested in the ocean to get in the water.
“We’d hang out in the store and go through the pile of old surf magazines again and again,” says Isaac. “And every page, I was like, ‘I want to do this.’ I’d never ridden a wave before, but it sparked a desire in me. It was something completely different from the world I knew.”
Eventually, Isaac and some of his friends managed to scrape together enough money to buy secondhand boards from Lipschitz, and Isaac’s infatuation with surfing bloomed as the political situation in South Africa steadily escalated. The townships, where much of the country’s Black population was forced to live, were ablaze with rebellion. Meanwhile, on the international stage, the South African government had become a pariah.
“It wasn’t easy to just go and surf when we wanted to,” Isaac says, referring to the Group Areas Act, a piece of legislation that was the cornerstone of apartheid, designating where people could live, work, and move, based on the color of their skin. “As youngsters, we knew there were certain rules, and our freedom only allowed us so much space to maneuver. You just didn’t cross some borders. That was the harsh reality. As kids, this seemed normal to us, and we just stayed in our safe zones, which were Cemetery and Muizenberg Beach. As we got older, we were angry and started to push back. But, back then, we just wanted to go surfing.
“I don’t really like to dwell on what happened during that era. It brings back a lot of bad memories, and, for me, it’s more important that we move forward in life. We need to look at how we can fix things to make them better, especially in this country—better for our families, better for the generations to come. That will never happen if we’re always turning the narrative back to the past.”
While most of his community couldn’t identify with Isaac’s newfound obsession, his days at the surf shop would end up shaping his trajectory far beyond the high-tide line. “When I first started hanging out at the shop,” he says, “I’d go back home and do drawings of the waves we looked at in the magazines. I wasn’t really an academic person, and drawing was always something I did. I found a lot more pleasure in drawing and doing little illustrations. One of my schoolteachers saw this and suggested I study graphic design at a technikon after school.”
Technikons, a type of college, were among the few tertiary-education institutions that admitted students of all races in South Africa at the time, and inevitably they became hotbeds of political activism. “It was only when I went to tech that I realized people can’t put you in a box,” Isaac says. “I was allowed to wear a T-shirt, long pants, and no shoes, and no one could do anything about it. It was incredibly liberating, coming from a school and an entire system pretty much designed around putting you in a box. At the same time, I started to connect my graphic design to surfing, and I felt such freedom putting the two together.”
By then, Isaac had developed a keen interest in printing and started silk-screening his own T-shirts and selling them. That quickly evolved into working for underground anti-apartheid movements, designing everything from posters to T-shirts, banners, flyers—“whatever was needed to get the message out there” in order to exert pressure on the South African government, which was beginning to buckle under the weight of sanctions and unrest. In his final year at tech, he met Marsha, a student from Johannesburg, and convinced her to model for some of his photography assignments.
“At first it was one shoot, then two, then three,” he quips. The couple married shortly after graduating, and they have remained inseparable ever since. Michael, their first son, was born on May 17, 1993, the same year Nelson Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Fast-forwarding to the end of the 1990s, when South Africa was buoyed by a sense of optimism and a booming economy, both Isaac and Marsha were contracted to work for renowned advertising agency Saachi & Saachi. “The hours became crazy,” says Isaac. “Mikey would come to the agency straight after school, and for a good few years he basically grew up there. That was his life. But it exposed him to some of the most amazing art directors, copywriters, illustrators. There was all this creativity around, and he absorbed it like a sponge.”
Surfing, however, was a stickier prospect. “I was more stoked on the idea of him surfing than he was at first,” Isaac laughs. It was only when the Februarys moved from the inner city to Kommetjie, a seaside village located deep in the southern bend of the Cape Peninsula, that Mikey began to find his groove. “We couldn’t believe it when he started winning these little contests against kids who had much more experience,” Isaac says. “But, as he grew older, I got to understand his nature better: He’s determined, and if he puts his mind to something, he will achieve it. A lot of people think he just loves freesurfing, but, deep down in his heart, he is also a fierce competitor.”
For February, surfing would also become an affirmation of his identity. “I remember when I was 11, my dad got Jeff Divine’s book with all those surfing photos from the ’70s,” he says. “I’d spend hours paging through it, and it had that iconic shot of Buttons looking back and throwing the peace sign on the cover. I had a little bit of an Afro growing up, and I wasn’t aware of too many people of color who surfed at that stage. Seeing Buttons made me realize there was a place in surfing for someone like me and I could be comfortable just being myself.
“I loved how unorthodox Buttons was. Nothing he did looked planned, but it always looked like he was having so much fun—going switchfoot, doing these crazy turns. It looked like he was playing in the ocean, even though the stuff that he did was pretty technical. When you surf, it’s essentially for yourself and enjoying what you get from it in the moment. It’s kind of a reflection of who you are. That really shone through in his surfing.”
February also took note of the equipment Buttons was riding, particularly a stubby single-fin with a huge swallowtail that looked more like a UFO than a surf craft. The board was, in fact, a kneeboard shaped by Ben Aipa, based on his revolutionary Sting design. According to Akila Aipa, Buttons co-opted the kneeboard from his father, and it ended up playing a significant role in allowing him to translate his skate-inspired style to the lineup.
For February, however, these influences would only fully congeal years later. Like most of his peers, he dedicated himself to excelling on a shortboard, with one goal in mind: competitive ascendance. He dominated the local junior circuit and, in 2017, after several years of grinding on the World Qualifying Series (WQS), came within a few points of qualifying for the championship tour. When Mick Fanning announced his retirement in early 2018, it opened up a spot for the next-highest seed on the WQS, and February found himself among the elite ranks of competitive professional surfing.
The first half of the year was brutal for the rookie, marked by a string of early-round defeats. When it came to systematically disemboweling a wave and stamping one’s authority on a heat, February just wasn’t in the same league.
“I always wanted to be on tour,” he says, looking back. “That was my dream since I was a kid. Then you get there, and the commitment that those guys have at that level is amazing. They’re just constantly analyzing and assessing everything. It pushed me because I always felt they were levels above me, but that pressure can weigh heavily on you. There were definitely moments that I felt like I didn’t belong there.”
Despite this, fans and commentators quickly became enamored with his unconventional style, which had gained a global platform. Former world champion Barton Lynch summed it up eloquently while commentating on a heat between February and Filipe Toledo at Jeffreys Bay during the Corona Open. “Sometimes his approach and the lines he draws aren’t the lines most suited to a contest format,” Lynch observed. “But his interpretation of a wave, and the individuality he shows, is second to none.”
Midway through the year, between the J-Bay and Teahupoo events, a trip to Ghana ended up being a revelation for February. Cut loose from the confines of a contest vest, he opted to ride a twin-fin for most of the trip. The waves fired, and his solo sessions at a rifling West African sandspit soon became the backbone of Nü Rythmo, a short video project that went viral and quietly affirmed Africa was holding untold potential—not only in terms of waves, but in the unique approach of surfers like February.
“That was probably the best time I had all year,” he says. “I felt like myself again. It was a privilege to be on tour, and I was so grateful to be there, but I had started to realize that maybe I didn’t have the single-minded competitive focus to be able to carry on doing that. I knew I wasn’t going for a world title, and I’d started to ask, ‘What’s my purpose here?’ It opened my eyes and made me realize that the tour might not exactly be where I wanted to focus my surfing and my life. It was a great feeling to admit that to myself.”
The same board he rode in West Africa, which helped unlock this realization, sits framed behind February in the garage as we talk. The twin-fin is a replica of the design Mark Richards shaped and rode to his first world title in 1978 and was personally made for February by the four-time world champion.
But the West African foray wasn’t a lucky one-off—it was more the culmination of a long-standing affinity for less-conventional craft. February’s first shaper, Johno Hutchison, had been a firm proponent of the twin-keel fish, and when February turned 12, Hutchison shaped him a 5’2″ with handcrafted wooden keel fins and handed it to him on his birthday as a present. “I remember jumping on it for the first time and experiencing this completely different feeling,” February says. “Just free, and being able to draw different lines. It made me realize that there was a different way you could ride waves.”
Isaac further credits Hutchison with passing to February a deep appreciation for the art of board-building. “I remember taking Mikey to collect some boards from Johno on the North Coast,” he says, describing the lush subtropical zone that lies north of Durban. “When we got there, he pointed to a big tree in his yard and said, ‘Mikey, you see that tree there? The day before I shaped your board, I put the blank in the tree so it could listen to the sound of the ocean.’ Johno put all his love and knowledge into Mikey’s boards, and I think that made him realize there’s far more to surfboards than just these things that come out of a factory.”
After the trip to West Africa, February’s quiver started undergoing a metamorphosis. “I’d always have a couple of alternate boards that I’d jump on in between contests, just to ride something different,” he says. “When I fell off the tour, my quiver ended up going from mostly performance shapes and one or two fun boards to half-and-half.” By the end of that year, conventional shortboards had become the exception.
February’s quiver today is an assemblage of different shapes and outlines, ranging from finless craft and fishes to mid-lengths, twinnies, and gliders. Part of his quest, he says, is to push performance on alternate craft and unlock different ways to navigate a wave. If, in the process, his surfing has become the antithesis of “contest surfing,” it’s ironic—because being on tour laid the foundation for this approach.
While competing, February immersed himself in surfboard design to get the most out of his equipment, working closely with Britt Merrick from Channel Islands. It was only at the end of his year on tour, he says, that he really started to piece together his boards with a refined understanding of how best to approach a wave. And when he failed to requalify, he continued to apply the same lessons to the different shapes he’d started riding.
This thinking would eventually lead to the Twin Pin model that he developed with Merrick, a design that has become synonymous with his surfing. “Even before West Africa, I had really been enjoying twin-fins, but I wanted something more suited to the right-hand pointbreaks that we have in South Africa,” he says. “Twin-fins are great for speed and feel so free, but they aren’t always the best at holding in the pocket. I wanted something that would hold and have more flow between turns, so I asked Britt if he could shape me a twin-fin with a round tail, because I felt like that would go best in the kind of waves I wanted to ride.”
When asked about the collaboration, Merrick admits that the first board they designed together was a dud. “It happens often,” he says. “I’ll make a board for a team rider based on an idea they have, and I think the board is going to be great, and then it’s dead in the water. That’s just part of the process. The goal is to keep moving forward.”
The concept truly came together only when Merrick joined February in J-Bay for R&D during the South African winter of 2019. A series of low-pressure storms provided the grist, and the duo got down to work.
Merrick is the first to point out that the rounded twin-pin concept is not new. His father, Al Merrick, was among a number of shapers making them back in the ’70s. He adds that the design he and February eventually developed also drew on the original performance twin that Mark Richards had designed during that era, featuring a pronounced vee that allows the board to transition from rail to rail.
“There’s no concave, so it’s got a flat entry rocker and vee out the second half,” says Merrick. “When I think of how much vee is in the back half of the board, it’s almost like a fin effect—like a stabilizer. One of the cool things about twin-fins is you have to learn to engage your rail and your inside fin. On thrusters, you just rely so much on that back fin, but with a twin-fin you’ve got to learn to use your rail to surf it properly.”
The duo tinkered for close to two years until February officially showcased the design in the seminal film Sonic Souvenirs, directed by Kai Neville. Shot in South Africa, the end result was arguably some of the most technically creative surfing ever seen at J-Bay.
Riding a mustard-yellow 5’10”, February can be seen streaking down a succession of waves between rain squalls. The rides are peppered with expressive bottom turns and high-line drives. His surfing is fluid yet focused, punctuated by searing turns in the pocket. The subtle adjustments and reflexive body positioning that Neville draws out appear balletic on screen.
“Once Mikey was off the tour, I could see that there was just this hunger to still surf at a high level and explore other boards, but he was free of all that pressure and having to surf a certain way,” says Isaac. “I just marveled at how his surfing grew from there.”
There are perhaps a handful of surfers in the world whose style is universally appealing, even to non-surfers. This is partly explained by the fact that humans are physiologically attracted to coordinated physical movement that is pleasing to the eye because it stimulates our brain’s reward centers. Synchronized movements, where different elements are moving together in a harmonious way (in this case, surfer and wave), are especially rewarding.
Writing in Scientific American, Columbia University neurologist John Krakauer takes this line of thinking further, pointing to growing evidence that suggests synchronized movements can trigger the “mirror neurons” in our cerebral cortex. These neurons are the building blocks of learning and fire both when we perform an action and when we observe the same action being performed by someone else.
Using the example of a dancer watching other dancers, Krakauer explains that the research indicates that when you watch someone perform an action you’re familiar with, your brain’s “movement areas” will be activated. You will unconsciously start planning and predicting how that person will move, based on what you would do, creating a pleasurable sensation.
It’s not a stretch to replace dancing with surfing, and, as Krakauer concludes, “that may lead to the [increased] pleasure we get from seeing someone execute a movement with expert skill—that is, seeing an action that your own motor system cannot predict.”
Put simply, we enjoy watching surfers like February because they ride waves in a beautiful way that is different from what we anticipate. “I guess it’s like listening to different music,” February replies when I posit this theory to him, politely deflecting the attention from himself to the wave. “Every wave has a different sort of tempo or rhythm, whatever you want to call it, that makes you approach it differently.”
The search for this type of synchronicity with different waves and the desire to draw different lines—along with the process of working with Merrick—led to February also becoming adept with a planer. When the COVID pandemic imposed forced lockdowns in South Africa, he suggested to Isaac they use the garage in the family home to make boards.
“My dad is a really creative guy,” he says. “He’s always got a bunch of projects on the go, and he gets really excited about new ideas. But I don’t think he’s used to me teaching him anything. I’d tell him, ‘Maybe do it like this’ and leave him, and when I’d come back he was just doing it completely his own way!”
The shaping trestles have since become a permanent fixture in Isaac’s garage, where he likens building boards to any endeavor that marries creativity with a practical application. The process, Isaac says, is key. “I think as humans, we’re so bound to this commercial world where we see a need and we go, ‘Okay, where can I buy it from?’ We don’t ask ourselves, ‘How can I create it?’ or ‘How can I restore it?’ or ‘How can I take something that has one function and turn it into something else?’”
By being part of that process, he says, you have a much better understanding and appreciation of the object you are making—or of how you can adapt it to best suit your needs. The analogy with his son’s surfing is obvious, but Isaac prefers to use a recollection from his childhood to illustrate his point.
“My grandfather was a cobbler,” he says. “He made shoes, and he was always busy with little side projects in his garage. I remember he had this old, broken-down Ford that was in his workshop, and he stripped the whole body until it was just an engine, a gearbox, and a frame on wheels. When I came back one day, he had connected the axle and put in a saw blade that was running on the belt and cutting up these huge logs. He’d made a sawmill from that old car, and I was like, ‘This guy is incredible!’ My whole life, he’s been my inspiration. Now I see my grandson when he walks into my garage and looks around…”
He trails off.
Deeper in the garage is a framed poster that features a striking portrait of a man, perhaps in his late sixties, gazing intently at the camera, with the title “FEBRUARY” written across the top. The poster is from an exhibition that Isaac helped design and curate for the Slave Lodge Museum in Cape Town to give a voice to the descendants of slaves in South Africa.
Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more than 70,000 enslaved people were shipped from Africa and Asia to what was then known as the Cape Colony. The Dutch colonists would simply assign each person a surname according to the month in which they had arrived. There weren’t any records kept with people’s identities or where they were from. Everything was taken from them, even their names.
The exhibition portrayed 12 descendants of slaves in an oversized calendar, in which each person shared their story according to the month of their surname. It was both a tribute and a search for identity, says Isaac. Many of these people became craftsmen after they were emancipated and literally helped build the country’s foundations with their work and ingenuity, handing skills down from generation to generation.
“I’m very proud of being a February,” he says. “They made our names mean something.”
He then reads an excerpt from the poster out loud: “You mustn’t forget your roots. Roots make you who you are. I’m just a product of history. It’s what I make of myself. That is the difference.”
A light offshore wind has picked up and thrums gently through the rafters, peppering the air with the smell of kelp and sea salt. It’s getting late, and both father and son are keen to go surf the beachbreak down the road, where Isaac says the banks have been good lately. Before we exit the garage, he pulls from a rack against the wall a board that he and Mikey shaped together.
He looks it over, then puts it under his arm. “I think I’ll ride this one today,” he says.
[Feature Image by Jimmy Wilson]
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