Box of Light is made possible thanks to these visionaries:
I found myself in the winter of 1995 travelling and surfing around South Africa with a good friend, also named Derek. We arrived at Jeffery's Bay, a highlight of our three-month sojourn, to discover it was flat as a pancake. For a week we surfed 1-2 foot Supertubes – nothing like the spectacle we'd anticipated, or even close to the waves we'd encountered the month prior. We certainly got to know the sand and reef layout at that size.
With the Rugby World Cup in full flight we decided to go and have lunch with the All Blacks back in Port Elizabeth, a few hours' drive from J-Bay. We ran into a few mates following the tour and Derek got caught up in the buzz and jumped on tour.
I couldn't get J-Bay out of my head, so returned solo. As I drove around the bend on the east side of the bay I could see white lines running down the point. J-Bay was on. I spent the next month living above the Spar supermarket with a glimpse of Supertubes just beyond legendary surfer Derek Hynd's house. It was a 200m walk to the jump rock. I lived on bunny chow and drinking yoghurt for a grand total of about $8 a day.
I got to know the locals and one day a J-Bay shaper talked me into buying a 6'5" board he'd designed just for J-Bay's walls. It had a rasta stripe spray down the deck that suited my dreadlocks at that time. And, wow, was that board magic. I surfed four different swells over that four-week period. And only rode that one board. The board made everything easy. I was even getting tubed.
At one point I didn't make it out of a tube and got worked pretty hard. I came up, paddled back and then noticed I'd creased the board. A local reckoned it was fixable so I decided to head in on the next wave. As soon as I stood up I remembered the crease so eased into a bottom turn, but I wasn't as graceful as I thought I was being. The board snapped and stripped the rasta spray and fibreglass right off the deck. I cried.
I told this story to Seer Surfboards' shaper, Homa, a year or so ago. He responded with a typically cryptic utterance ... he likes to challenge the norm as you can read in the feature we did on him recently. He asked about the spray and drilled into the magic elements of the board, which he boiled down to being about how much fun I had on it. I didn't think much more about it, other than, he was right.
A few weeks ago, Homa called me to pick up my new board. He'd made me an incredible twin fin with rasta smoke spray to connect it to my time in J-Bay. I nearly fell over when I saw this beautiful work of art – it could hang quite happily as an art piece. But, no, Homa insists it is made to be dunked in the brine.
I had to photograph the board in my studio to capture its beauty ... you can see those shots below. And, yes, if anything happens to this board I will almost certainly cry again.
See you at the beach ... Derek
PS I spent the early part of my photography career working in magazines, so when the team at L&L Magazine (formerly Life and Leisure) wanted to feature a story of me and my wife's creative lifestyle, we felt very honoured. My wife, Rachael, is an incredible jeweller and together we're your typical creative couple: mostly late, mostly broke, but full of optimism. We created three very cool kids somehow and they feature in the beautiful story written by Campbell MacPherson and Lucinda Diack. Local photographer Georgie Daniell took the photos of us for the feature and she did such a good job of it. You can find L&L Magazine's Summer 2025 issue on all good newsstands throughout New Zealand. Grab a copy ... or better still buy yourself, or a friend, a subscription for Xmas.
Box of Light is made possible thanks to these visionaries: