Life of a Grom: Young Surfers of Jeffreys Bay

Walk down to Lower Point on any afternoon with a bit of swell and you'll find kids paddling out before or after school, some barely tall enough to see over the dashboard on the drive down. Life of the Grom, a short documentary from local filmmakers SLAP Productions, sat down with eleven of them, aged 11 to 19, and asked how they got here and what keeps them coming back.

Featuring Mikayla Jeffries, Anastasia Venter, Josh Jansen, Ruby Watson, Indie Ellerington, Noah Hambly, Mateo Ohlhoff, Reece Smit, Mani Ellerington, Nathan Harley and Carter Darcy. A film by SLAP Productions.

How it starts

Almost every story in the film starts with a parent, an older sibling, or both. Several of the groms describe being carried out on a longboard before they could swim properly, or taught by fathers and grandfathers who surfed the same stretch of point decades earlier.

One of the older surfers, Mani Ellerington, ended up staying in Jeffreys Bay for good after being "stuck here during Covid." The youngest in the film, 11-year-old Mateo Ohlhoff, is already deep into the sport.

One surfer jokes that their first real session was a shove. A friend group dragged them back into the water after they'd sworn off it as kids, terrified of the deep water off the point. It stuck anyway.

What surfing means to them

Josh Jansen, 17, talks about respect in a crowded lineup. You're never the only one out there, and surfing well means making room for everyone else's wave too. Others describe it as a way out of the house and away from screens, a source of calm during hard stretches, a daily routine that shapes everything else around it. More than one grom in the film calls surfing a way of living.

Dream waves and surf heroes

Pushed to name a dream destination, the answers range from anywhere with warm water (after a childhood of Jeffreys Bay's chilly Indian Ocean) to Hawaii's most demanding reef breaks, Indonesia, Portugal's surfing coast, and a slow van trip down the New Zealand coastline chasing empty lefts. A few admit the scariest wave they can imagine is also the one they'd most love to ride. Favourite surfers named in the film: Carissa Moore, John John Florence, Griffin Colapinto, Lakey Peterson, Kelly Slater.