Cast your mind back to The Endless Summer’s idyllic footage of Cape St Francis - an almost unnaturally perfect wave, newly discovered. Dylan Wichmann transports us into the 21st Century of foiling awesomeness at this epic location.

Cape St Francis has become like my second home over the past few years and I make the 8 hour trip up the East Coast every time I get the chance. Saint Francis as a whole also holds a special place in my heart as it is the place where I learned to foil almost 4 years ago now. 

After finishing my schooling, I moved to Cape St Francis and began to run the local surf school. I ran the school for about 5 years before it was time to call it quits and begin to study before it was too late. In the time that I lived there, I was welcomed by the local surf community and during my time up the coast, my family bought a flat which is a 100m walk from the famous Seal Point.

As 2021, drew closer to an end, I began to plan my annual Summer trip up the coast. Unfortunately, during the month and a half I was up the coast we had some of the worst conditions on record and almost 3 weeks of onshore winds made the sea temperature plummet to sub-10 degrees Celsius at times. But after the start of the 2022 New Year, the weather finally started to plan into our favour. The sandbanks on the beach breaks began to line up, and a few good days of swell and wind, made the sub-par December conditions feel like a distant memory.

Cape St Francis and St Francis Bay are 2 small towns that are separated by a nature reserve, each town has its own unique spots to surf and foil. Cape St Francis consists of Seal Point, with a long beach break with multiple peaks all along the roughly 3km stretch of sand. 

St Francis Bay, is home to the even more famous Bruce’s Beauties which barely resembled the picturesque point break barrels that appeared in the Endless Summer movies. The next break down from Bruce’s is Hullettes which is one of the best longboard waves in the country and can be insane for foiling when it's empty, but it is usually packed with dozens of children and every watercraft you can think of. For this reason, I try to avoid foiling Hullettes if there are other waves on offer that day.

A few kilometres down from Bruce’s and Hullettes, we have a river mouth where all the wind sports take place. In the past, the river mouth has not been very conducive for wing-foiling, but due to rapid erosion happening across the whole coastline of St Francis Bay a new channel has been created that is perfect for foiling. 

Only a year ago, I would wing at the river mouth and be the only foiler among a myriad of kite surfers. But this year, a big crew of the local surfers has taken up foiling and we had about 5 to 10 wings on the water whenever the wind was strong enough. There have also been a few of the younger local surfers taking up foiling and they are all improving incredibly fast. I think that over the next few years we will have a few really good foilers coming out of St Francis. 

Unifoil was founded in Jeffrey’s Bay and most of the prototype foils that Clifford has been cooking up are still made locally in J-Bay. So whenever I made a trip up the coast, there are usually a few foils that Clifford has ready for me to test and this year was no exception. I love being involved in the testing and R&D of new equipment. It is so much fun to be able to try a foil that feels completely different from everything else that you’ve ridden before and trying to figure out how the foil likes to be flown. Although not every foil design I have tested has gone to market, I am continually amazed how every foil I have tried from Clifford immediately works and each foil I have tested seems to become my new favourite foil. 

I also got the chance to try the first line of the new Vyper foils that Unifoil is about to release. The Vypers have been such game-changers for my foiling since I started to ride them. They are incredibly fast, super responsive, and are still pretty easy to pump.  They are really efficient foils once you get the hang of them. The profile is quite a lot thinner than the vortex and hyper foils which means that they have less initial lift but the thinner profile allows you to tide at much higher speeds. The biggest difference I have noticed is in pumping the foils. The cadence of your pumping needs to be quite a lot more, but that’s where the efficiency of the foil becomes unlocked. 

I find that when the foil requires a more rapid pump cadence, instead of using your quads to pump, as if you were doing squats, it requires much smaller movements that can be achieved using much more of one's ankles and calves to create a faster pumping technique. This places much less strain on your leg muscles and results in longer sessions and after the session, it doesn’t feel like your quads are going to explode like on the previous generation of foils. 

Although my annual trip up the East Coast was not as expected, it allowed me to explore new things and spend more time foiling in conditions that I wouldn’t usually go out in. When the conditions did line up, it made the sessions that much more memorable, and I was reminded of the unique foiling conditions St Francis has to offer. I still think it has some of the county’s best foil spots, and while foiling is still such a new sport I get to ride most of these spots with no one else out.

By Dylan Wichmann

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