Did You Know? 10 Facts About Jeffreys Bay

In 1849 Joseph Avent Jeffery and his partner John Glendinning put up a wood-and-iron warehouse and store on this stretch of coast, and the settlement took the senior partner's name. Jeffery later bought erven 1, 2, 9 and 10 for £79 and built the double-storey house locals called the White House. Jeffreys Bay was only proclaimed a town in 1926. Sources: Wikipedia and Jeffreys Bay Tourism.

John Whitmore — the Cape Town pioneer who also founded Springbok surfing and later appeared in The Endless Summer — is credited with discovering the waves at Jeffreys Bay in 1959. The point wasn't regularly surfed until the late 1960s. Source: The Oom: John Whitmore biography.

Bruce Brown shot that famous sequence in 1963 at Cape St Francis, down the coast from here, with Mike Hynson and Robert August. The wave they rode — later nicknamed Bruce's Beauties — became the highlight of The Endless Summer (1966). Brown's narration made it sound like it broke that way most of the year. It doesn't. The more consistent right that visiting surfers kept coming for was Jeffreys Bay, next door. Sources: Encyclopedia of Surfing and Surfline.

Supertubes on its own runs about 300 metres. The full point is a string of named sections — Kitchen Windows, Magna Tubes, Boneyards, Supertubes, Impossibles, Tubes, the Point, Albatross — and when a big, even swell lines them all up, Boneyards can connect through to the Point for a ride over a kilometre long. Almost nobody makes it. Sources: Openwaterpedia and SurferToday.

Cheron Kraak came back to J-Bay in 1978 with one portable sewing machine, started making boardshorts on the beach, and traded gear with surfers in exchange for their help turning a matchbox-sized garage into the town's first surf shop. That was Country Feeling. A handshake with Australian shaper Gordon Merchant later turned into Billabong's South African operation, and her staff went from eight people to 350. She's also the one who coined "Only a surfer knows the feeling". Sources: Country Feeling and The Citizen.

The first international event at Supers was the 1981 Beach Hotel Classic, won by Shaun Tomson. Country Feeling took over the naming rights the next year, with no waiting period and barely any advertising — Mark Occhilupo's 1984 win is still the one people talk about. It only became a full world tour stop in 1996, when Kelly Slater won the first one. Slater and Mick Fanning have four J-Bay titles each. Source: World Surf League.

On 19 July 2015, a shark knocked Mick Fanning off his board during the J-Bay Open final, live on air. He punched it, got picked up by the safety boats unharmed, and the final was cancelled with the points and prize money split between him and Julian Wilson. He came back and won the event in 2016. Sources: World Surf League and The Guardian.

Dolphins are a regular part of the scenery here — a New Year visitor even filmed a large pod surrounding a paddle boarder just offshore. Kouga's environmental unit puts southern right whales along this coast between July and October, and humpbacks from June to December. Sources: The South African and Kouga Municipality.

The Jeffreys Bay Shell Museum opened on 15 September 1998 around the lifetime collection of local resident Charlotte Kritzinger, and a recent inventory put it at roughly 2,000 species from around the world — one of the largest collections in the country. Over 400 species turn up on the beaches here, and the museum has a display of 160 micro shells, some only 3mm across. Sources: Jeffreys Bay Tourism and Kouga Municipality.

The sandbank the wave breaks over depends on the dunes behind it, and those are looked after by the Supertubes Surfing Foundation, a non-profit started by the local surf clubs and registered in 2004. They rescued and replanted around 3,000 aloes, and they maintain the parks, gardens and boardwalks along the beachfront. The coastline from Supertubes to Paradise Beach is a WESSA Green Coast site, and Dolphin Beach holds Blue Flag status for the 2025/26 season. Sources: News24 and Kouga Municipality.