“People are not wrong when they think of Mozambique and dreamy right-hand point breaks,’ says Sung Min Cho, the African country’s only professional surfer. “Winter is coming, it’s cooling down, and the offshore land breeze is kicking in. If the sand is in the right place, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
Cho was born to a Mozambican mother and a Korean father in South Africa. The family moved to Tofo when he was 12, and two years later, he started surfing after a tourist loaned him a board. The small surf and holiday town sits on a thin peninsula that juts out from the mainland roughly 1000 kilometres north of Durban. You’ve no doubt seen images and clips of its best-known point, Tofinho, which feeds off solid southern swells generated by storms formed in the Roaring 40s in peak seasons between May and August. They are gift-wrapped around its sand-covered reef, with two takeoff zones providing rippable walls and long barrels through its tropical turquoise waters in the peak south swell season of April-August.
“The last few years we’ve had poor sand on the points, to be honest. They never had the chance to replenish after a number of cyclones smashed us each summer,” said Cho. “This year we’ve had no cyclones, and the sand looks amazing; it could be epic.”
Cho has already posted clips showing the powerful natural footer mixing smooth tube riding and big carves. His surfing is best seen in Chasing the Unicorn, a film which traces the history of surfing in post-war Mozambique.
He holds down the line-up, not only as the finest surfer to come from Mozambique, and the first to surf on the QS, but as one of its key players in trying to create a local culture and legacy. Articulate, hard-working and selfless, few surfers are better suited to the role.
He runs the Tofo Surf Club, a sister foundation to the Durban-based Surfers Not Street Children, a program that has been changing homeless and deprived African kids’ lives for more than two decades. Both programs fuse surfing, mentorship and care by using dedicated local teams of experts in the community.
The Tofo chapter has now been running for eight years. Some of the kids that came into the program had lived a childhood in an environment dominated by poverty, violence and addiction. They are now working in hospitality and tourism, and have maintained a love of surfing. “Not only are they doing really well, but they are helping create and feed a local surf culture. To have opportunities in life and a love of surfing is what the surf club here mainly is for,” said Cho.
Traditionally, the line-up at Tofo was made of expats, the odd posse of keen surfers and pros chasing dedicated swells and escaping the cold Cape Town winters. Most tourists are South African holidaymakers, drawn in by the cheap living, bath-like water, sunny skies, and marine megafauna like rays and whale sharks. Due in no small part to the Tofu Surf Club, though the crowd is now made up of local kids who live to shred the point, as well as the beachbreaks to the north of the town.
The area was set for a further boost when the Capítulo Perfeito, the invitational barrel riding event based in Portugal, was set to run its first international version near Tofo. Due to be held at the increasingly less secret wave known as “The African Kirra,” it was the lack of cyclones over the summer that meant the wave didn’t get the bigger east swells the draining right-hander requires.
Mini was one of the local invites, but will now have to wait until next summer to compete against a selection of the world’s best tube hounds. In the interim, he led a Mozambique team to its first-ever African Games held in Angola, where they finished a remarkable second. His goal now is to raise funds to get the athletes to their first ISA World Games, with the ultimate dream of qualifying for the Olympics.
“I want to help have surfing become recognised in Mozambique as a legitimate sport, but I also want to create a pathway for the next generation to follow. It’s a light and dreamy place to be a surfer, but there have been plenty of heavy obstacles in our path. We just need to keep moving them.”
Related: It Started With a Photograph: A Return to Blouberg, Seventy Years On
Original Post from this site