“My bru, don’t you dare post that wave photo on social media.”
Whether these words come from the mouth of a close friend, a surly local, a complete stranger, an uppity grom, a stoned car guard or the weirdo with a unibrow you woke up next to after a helluva bender, if you are a surfer Trident has no doubt you’ve heard words to that effect before when taking a photo of a wave.
In Trident’s humble opinion however, the following needs to be considered before forming any judgement or response to the words you have just heard.
Is the wave in question Supertubes, Long Beach or New Pier, or pretty much the most well known or easily accessible and consistent wave in your specific area? If the answer is yes, then tread carefully people. Trident will not give you full permission to subject the speaker to 40 lashes with the nearest handy surf leash. However, there’s no need to add fuel to the fire when it comes to popular and/or famous surf breaks. Rather hang onto those pics for a post session share, or even better – for your own personal records. Nevertheless, here’s a revelation people. Spots like the afore mentioned waves were crowded well before social media, and will be crowded long after social media is replaced with whatever else is coming after to ruin our lives. Granted, not posting pics may make no difference to the crowds, but for the love of Neptune, the main surf breaks across the country will generally be busier than a Moscow bread line pre-1989. There’s no point in risking an already crowded-to-bursting Muizenberg getting invaded by more oddballs resembling the banjo-playing kid from Deliverance and the Hee-Haw gang.
We clearly certainly don’t advocate, er – advocating when there waves at obvious spots, but in the same breath, any surfer that is intelligent enough to find their own arsehole without a GPS and has some degree of experience should know when waves are to be expected. May as well ban the internet, synoptic charts and SABC weather reports. (Trident is all for banning the latter).
Then… conversely. What if the spot you’ve just snapped a pic of, is a lesser known or a kinda secret wave – or a break that is known to be fickle and temperamental? Is it a difficult to find wave, or in a coastal town that is neither J Bay nor St Francis nor on the KZN South Coast? If so – snap away, but bru… don’t you dare post that wave photo on social media. And for that matter – don’t even think of putting it up post session either.
You can see where we’re going with this. Although Trident is reasonable, measured and possesses much common sense (for example, we wear tinfoil underpants under our wetsuits to prevent the government from making us pregnant via radio waves even though we’re male) – we say this – rather don’t post pics on social media. Unless the spot is already a free-for-all. In which case, you may actually help prevent crowds – by others seeing how busy it is already. This is a controversial topic, and we’ll certainly be doing future pieces on it. With photo’s no doubt.
