Tunnel Vision

The office: endless blue. The deadline: the surge of a killer wave. That’s how bodyboarding champ Andre Botha knows he’s made it

- Kieran Legg

THE KICKED AS HE FELT THE TIDE TUG on his legs, angling his body towards the horizon of sand and construction on the coast. And with a sudden surge he was hurtling through the water, his body board cutting lines of white foam in the green currents. “That moment,” says Andre Botha. “That’s when I knew I was hooked.” 

It was a short ride as the foaming breaker spent itself in the shallows, but he’d already glided almost effortlessly into his first and most important epiphany. This was 20 years ago, and the future world champion was just a young, tanned kid finding his sea legs.

But he had spent his youth in pursuit of meaning – a chase that saw him jump from board to board, skating, surfing, and finally, here. “That’s the thing. You can surf for years before you’re good enough to take on a big wave. But with body boarding, you hit the waves and you start to fly right away.”

Andre is a bearded Durbanite with his roots in Cape Town. When he speaks you can hear what 20 years of living in salty water, on exotic beaches and breathing in nothing but ocean air can do for a guy. In a word: he’s mellow.

It’s an attitude that infuses the slow cadence of his speech and the “ays” that punctuate his sentences, and that clearly shows what happens when you do what you love, no matter what. Andre thinks back fondly to that moment when he chose to body board. Like pulling a sword from a stone, his cheap Pick n Pay board was a vehicle for self-discovery. Within weeks he had progressed from greenhorn to great, earning a name for himself among the 20-odd body boarders who congregated around the Piers in North Beach. 

“Once I got hooked, I was full-on obsessed,” he admits.