The Cape St. Francis sequence in Endless Summer is surf moviemaking's immaculate sphere. Our Pythagorean ideal. Nothing to be added. Nothing subtracted. 

Perfection. The wave. The day. The surfers. The edit. The shivery little chamber orchestra melody as Bruce Brown and crew march across the dunes, dropping into soft swinging midtempo number as everybody gets their first look at those empty and hypnotizing Cape St. Francis waves. Then Mike Hynson. In trim, first wave. White trunks, white board, white track zippering off behind him, into the curl. 

It shames me to think that 20 years ago I fussily pointed out that Brown played fast and loose with the Cape St. Francis particulars. But I walked it back, fast. Or most of the way back. Here's what I said in History of Surfing.

Endless Summer features real surfers traveling to real locations, and it couldn't be described as anything but a documentary. Except Bruce Brown didn't really care about documenting, in any real sense, his four-month trip around the world. He didn't care about documenting the sport in general, for that matter. What he wanted to do—what he did flawlessly—was present the look and feel of surfing in its best moments. Endless Summer was an impressionist work. Brown was craftsman enough to arrange, conceal, accent, and outright invent as required.

The untruths were mostly small and thrown in for dramatic effect, like the overstated 50-50 odds that a surfer on the wrong side of Durban's netted beaches would be killed by a shark. Some of the inventions were longer and more elaborate, including the discovery of Cape St. Francis. In the film, Brown, Hynson and August cross miles of sun-blasted dunes to finally stand gaping, along with the audience, before a heavenly vista of empty, sparkling-blue, right-breaking point surf. Brown, narrating, tells us that they'd started the day not expecting to find any surf. "We didn't even know if we'd find the water." But here it was, Brown continued, and he estimated that the Cape St. Francis surf was probably this good 300 days a year.

In truth, the group began their stay on the Cape by checking into a beachfront hostel. The following morning, Hynson noticed a likely-looking break a mile or so to the south, walked up by himself, started riding, and was soon joined by the others. Ninety minutes later, the wave shut down. And that was it for their visit. With nothing to surf the next day, they all spent two or three hours marching up and down the dunes for the camera; Brown had determined overnight that he needed an ex-post facto opening sequence to set up their wave score. The remark about Cape St. Francis surf being good 300 days a year—Brown pulled that out of thin air a few months later, while writing the voice-over.

An interesting thing happened when Hynson finally came forth with the real Cape St. Francis story in 1993. Nobody cared. The waves themselves were real, if nowhere near as consistent as Brown claimed, and the beachfront (at the time, anyway) really was made up of dunes. But it wasn't that. Every surfer, at some rare and transcendent moment, will unexpectedly find the perfect wave—even if it's just a fluke afternoon at their local shorebreak. In the editing room, Brown arranged events to highlight a universally shared surfing dream. A dream that occasionally comes true. It wasn't deceit. It was a gift.

BRUCE BROWN AND CAPE ST. FRANCIS: LYING YOUR WAY TO THE TRUTH

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