North Beach, Durban: the wave that invented pro surfing

On Durban's Golden Mile, wedged between Bay of Plenty and Dairy Beach, North Beach is the beach where South African competitive surfing was born. It hosted, in 1966, the country's very first national surfing championships, three years before the city launched its own professional contest.

Since the 1950s, generations of Durban surfers have shaped their style on this sandy beach break, netted for safety and constantly watched over by the lifeguards of the Durban Surf Lifesaving Club, whose clubhouse still anchors the beachfront today.

North Beach remains an entry point for anyone discovering the Golden Mile: the wave forgives more than its neighbour New Pier, while still turning noticeably more serious once the swell builds.

In 1969, three Durban locals, Max Wetteland, Ian Macdonald and Ernie Tomson, launched the Durban 500, renamed the Gunston 500 the following year: the oldest professional surf contest on the African continent. The first winner, Port Elizabeth's Gavin Rudolph, took home 500 rand, the sum that gave the event its name.

The contest ran every July on North Beach and neighbouring New Pier, quickly becoming a world-tour fixture for more than two decades. Ernie Tomson's son, Shaun, won it six years running between 1973 and 1978, before being crowned world champion in 1977: a home-turf run that's never been matched.

The Gunston 500 ended in 1999, a casualty of legislation banning tobacco advertising, its longtime sponsor. The event was reborn as the Mr Price Pro through 2008, before the baton passed to the Ballito Pro, held today 35 kilometres up the coast but still presented as the direct heir of Durban's very first contest.

Shaun Tomson was born in Durban in 1955, the son of Ernie Tomson, contest promoter and ocean lover. He started surfing at age ten under his father's guidance and won, at just twelve, the boys' division of the South African championships, on this very beach.

His local dominance at the Gunston 500, six straight wins from 1973 to 1978, ran alongside an international career that redefined modern tube riding at Pipeline, on Oahu's North Shore, before he claimed the world title in 1977. He remains, to this day, the ultimate reference of South African surfing.

His career has since been honoured with several inductions, including the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame in 1997 and the South African Sports Hall of Fame back in 1977, the year of his world title: proof that a career started on a neighbourhood beach can leave a mark on surfing history worldwide.

North Beach is a generous beach break: forgiving for an intermediate on modest swell, it turns into a genuinely tubing right once size passes shoulder-high. Waves can peel for around a hundred metres over the sand bottom, enough to string together several manoeuvres on a single ride.

The combination that switches the beach on pairs a southeast-quadrant swell with an offshore west wind, a setup most common through the southern winter, and June especially. Consistency is one of the spot's biggest strengths: it produces surfable waves almost year-round, which explains its steady crowds.

Every tide is workable, with no strict window to respect, a real plus for building a session around the rest of the day rather than the other way around.

North Beach suits every level, as long as you match your board to the day's size: a longboard on smaller days, a shortboard once it grows and the wave starts closing out with more purpose. That versatility is exactly what has made it, historically, a learning ground for generations of local surfers.

Crowds remain the main thing to watch: the beach fills up fast on small days, with sessions that can turn into a scrum during South African school-holiday peaks. Rocks and jellyfish round out the list of ordinary hazards, nothing severe for anyone paying attention.

The shark risk belongs to the city's history as much as its present reality: the first nets went in as early as 1952, then a series of fatal attacks in December 1957, remembered locally as 'Black December', pushed the province to create, in 1964, the body that would become the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board. North Beach has been among the netted beaches ever since.