The town of Fish Hoek, where I am spending this week, is one of many South African beach towns that have surf lifesaving clubs. These clubs train youngsters with the skills and fitness one must have to be a beach lifeguard. My coaches for this week, Dawid and Jasper Mocke, gained the foundation they needed for elite-level surfski racing by participating in surf lifesaving as children. Their late father was a pillar of the Fish Hoek club.
Yesterday afternoon the Fish Hoek Surf Lifesaving Club hosted the Nipper Classic, a competition among many regional clubs that featured some ten racing events. The events included swimming into the surf and back, paddling prone boards into the surf and back, and just plain running on the beach. That last discipline is the easiest to photograph with one's phone, and above we see a shot I got of the beach relay, in which teams of eight raced legs of about a hundred meters. We're looking at a baton exchange, and these exchanges had much to do with the final order of finish. I saw many lead changes as some teams blew big leads with bad exchanges while the teams that executed well ended up victorious.
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