Life of a Grom: Meet the Next Generation of Jeffreys Bay Surfers

Walk down to Lower Point on any afternoon with a bit of swell and you'll find them — a loose crew of kids, some barely tall enough to see over the dashboard on the drive down, paddling out before or after school like it's the most normal thing in the world. In Jeffreys Bay, it kind of is. Life of the Grom, a short documentary from local filmmakers SLAP Productions, sat down with eleven of them — aged 11 to 19 — to ask 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 the same way: 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 — surfing running in the family the way rugby or fishing might elsewhere. One of the older surfers, Mani Ellerington, ended up staying in Jeffreys Bay for good after being "stuck here during Covid" — a pandemic story that, for once, has a happy ending. The youngest in the film, 11-year-old Mateo Ohlhoff, is already deep enough into the sport that the question of how he started barely needs asking.

Not every entrance is so gentle. One surfer jokes that their first real session was less a lesson than a shove — a friend group dragging 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

Ask a room of adults what a sport means to them and you'll get platitudes. Ask a room of Jeffreys Bay groms, and you get something closer to a shared philosophy. Josh Jansen, 17, talks about respect in a crowded lineup — that you're never the only one out there, and surfing well means making room for everyone else's wave too. Others describe it in more personal terms: 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 puts it almost the same way, independently — that surfing isn't really a sport at all, so much as a way of living.

Dream Waves and Surf Heroes

Pushed to name a dream destination, the answers range from the practical (anywhere with warm water, after a childhood of Jeffreys Bay's chilly Indian Ocean) to the ambitious — Hawaii's most demanding reef breaks, Indonesia, Portugal's "surfing coast of Europe," 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 across the film read like a World Championship Tour highlight reel — Carissa Moore, John John Florence, Griffin Colapinto, Lakey Peterson, Kelly Slater — the same names these groms will be chasing down the rankings from, if a few of them get their way.

Growing Up on the Point

What comes through, watching eleven kids talk about the same short stretch of coastline, is how much of Jeffreys Bay's surf culture is inherited rather than taught in any formal sense — passed down at the water's edge, one small kid at a time. It's the same current that runs past Dwell at Point every morning: a family-friendly, pet-friendly stretch of the Point where the next generation of J-Bay surfers is already out before most of the town is awake.