Wild life | 24 August 2017

Indian Ocean coast

Like most men I wonder if I have been much good as a father, but one thing I got right was that I gave our children, Eve and Rider, the Indian Ocean. Before they could even walk my Claire taught her babies to feel happy splashing about in the sandy coral pools below my mother’s house, and this was where she taught them first to swim. They were still tiny, with curly blond locks, when they ran at the roaring breakers on the beach, getting completely lost in the white foam, then bobbing up to the surface with squeals of delight. They made up names for waves: small ones were ‘tippitisers’, a big one was an ‘abragabir’ and a huge one was called ‘Mickey Mouse Club’. They both grew up winning swimming races at school. Eve, an especially good competitive swimmer, said the sea felt like home. ‘Two things, mate,’ my son Rider, now 15, writes to me by text before I fly to the Kenya coast. ‘The waves are beautiful and I’ve peroxided my hair.’ As the aircraft banks sharply over the Indian Ocean on the final approach to landing, I see the swell, I see the energy in the water. Within an hour we are in Hassan’s sailing dhow heading out to the break with the usual crew. I look at my boy in his board shorts. Luckily, the peroxiding job failed because a clever mother heavily diluted the H2O2. His feet are huge, he’s growing a centimetre each month, the shoulders are expanded from surfing, and he’s getting a chiselled American jaw. As a boy I surfed with my siblings on plywood bodyboards every Sunday morning in the bay near home, where the sand sparkled with flecks of mica. During my noisy years as a foreign correspondent, I squandered what could have been my best surfing years on dry land, partying and chasing women.