For more than five decades, Salt Rock’s Mike Larmont has been at the heart of South African surfing.
Chatting to Mike at his Salt Rock home, with the ocean stretching out below us, it’s clear that surfing remains a constant in his life. The view is spectacular, but Mike’s attention keeps returning to the water. His latest project, Godfather of the Waves, is a book about a life that has taken him from Durban’s South Beach to some of the world’s most famous surf breaks.
Raised in Durban, Mike started out surfing on borrowed inflatable surfing mats before turning his attention to shaping boards. He used his mother’s bread knife to make his first surfboard, experimenting until he came up with something that worked. It was the beginning of Larmont Surfboards.
As his reputation grew, so did his curiosity about what was happening beyond South Africa. In 1978, he travelled overseas to explore developments in surfboard design and bring new ideas home. He built relationships with surfers, shapers and brands around the world, expanding his business interests into manufacturing, international brands and windsurfing.
Then there was ZigZag.
Mike was one of the magazine’s co-founders, alongside Paul Naudé, Ray Ahrens, Doug MacDonald and Graham Fiford. In the early days, there was nothing particularly slick about putting a magazine together. Pages were physically assembled and glued before going to the printer. Yet there was always time to catch a wave. As Mike reminisces: “We’d spend a couple of hours surfing every day.”
The book is full of such stories: famous waves, international adventures, business successes and failures, friendships with surfing legends and moments that could only have happened in Mike’s world. He writes about the surf scene of the 1960s and 1970s, the isolation South African sport experienced during the 1980s and the changes that followed. Along the way, he worked with international brands including Rip Curl, helped establish windsurfing in South Africa and coached local surfers competing internationally.
But the book is not simply a list of achievements. What makes it compelling is how little seems to have been planned. Mike followed the things that interested him, met people who opened new doors and was willing to give things a go. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it really didn’t.
That honesty is part of the book’s appeal. Mike is happy to tell stories in which he was not necessarily the hero, and there is plenty of humour in the telling.
These days, Mike calls Salt Rock home, but his eyes are still on the waves. More than 50 years after he first started shaping boards, his love of the ocean shows no sign of fading.
Details: Godfather of the Waves is available at www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za
