Mr Mikey February didn’t really want to surf. Or, not at the age of six, anyway, the first time his father took him out into the newly desegregated beaches near their home in Cape Town, South Africa. But when, a few years later, and on his own accord, Mr February enthusiastically embraced the sport (after taking lessons with a friend), his pop was thrilled. “He was just like a little kid,” Mr February says of his dad, “super, super excited about it. We got super into it as a family and would go to every single contest.”

In short order, Mr February began entering, and then moving up the charts of those contests. His jangly, jazzy style, animated by his long limbs, all angular elbows and knees, made for high marks from the judges. And, as you’ll find in the above video, which we shot with him in pre-quarantine times in Cuixmala, Mexico, that unique style makes for incredibly appealing shapes on screen (no small thing in today’s surf scene, and the world at large, of course, that consumes imagery above all else).

In 2018, at the age of 25, Mr February competed on the pro-tour – the first non-white South African to do so – and, as a result, became an avatar for both the new guard of surfers and for a more inclusive sport. To the extent that, every time he is written about or referred to now, he is described first as the man to break that racial barrier in a country that only officially broke its apartheid two years before he was born.

Mr February’s father, though, still remembers very vividly the times he was heckled, and even asked to leave the waves at Big Bay, just across from Robben Island while Mr Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned there. Fast forward 20-odd years, and Mr February added a bit of a coda to the story of Big Bay for his family. “I think it was Father’s Day,” he says now, “we have an event at that same beach, and I ended up winning that event. Obviously, I didn’t know what that meant, but I think for someone like my dad, that meant a whole lot.”

He acknowledges the position he now occupies, and really lights up when he talks about messages he receives from kids: “Whether they’re surfers or not, and they say, ‘Oh man, it’s so cool to see someone who looks like me doing what you do; it’s really inspiring.’ That part,” he says, “is really, really special.”

But Mr February does not surf with any sort of agenda. No one so patently enjoys the experience of being in the water, surfing for surf’s sake – to the point even that he describes the work he does in competitions as just that, work, and the times he is surfing for himself, a free surf, as something else, something like a soulful safari in the flow state.

“I think that’s the beauty of surfing,” he says of this apparent dichotomy. “I decided to not compete at all this year. And it looks like that’s the case for everyone, whether they have a choice or not. So that worked out fine. It’s definitely a difference of feeling, competing. And then on the other end, I’ve been moving more into this creative project aspect of the sport” – designing, shaping boards, working with brands and appearing in our Gone Surfin’ capsule video. Additionally, Mr February recently managed to donate more than 700 surfboards to Waves for Change, an organisation that provides access to surfing as a kind of therapy for children in communities affected by poverty, violence or conflict.   

Prior to Covid-19 shutting everything down, Mr February and his wife took a trip to Los Angeles for some fun in the sun, but quarantine caught him in Cape Town as hard as it did everyone everywhere. For more than 60 days, he says, they were holed up in the house (“only going to shops for groceries”), not surfing, not able to work out beyond dabbling in yoga, which was new to him. This, for a guy who, he says, would start to get a little antsy if he didn’t surf for three or four days, was a challenge. He did start learning to play the piano on an app.

“But, yeah,” he says, “I have been watching footage of old contests, just to remember what I was doing, to keep it familiar, and feed that part of myself. You definitely notice a few old things you’d like to change and obviously it’s frustrating because you can’t get out and do anything.”

To say Mr February is at home on a wave doesn’t really capture what’s going on, but it is a start. Dropping in, or aggressively climbing back up a wave wall for one of his jerky, knock-kneed twists or jumps, Mr February has the calm and charisma of someone caught dancing when they thought no one was looking. He appears so relaxed as to be almost laconic, non-plussed – his expression utterly relaxed as his knees and wrists and elbows break and lead him into a high torque maneuver. So you can imagine the glee with which he’s eyeing the softening of South Africa’s lockdown.

“I’m definitely going to focus along the coast here and just spend a lot of time in the ocean,” he says. In particular, he can’t wait to get back to Jeffreys Bay, one of the most famous breaks in the world ­– “the perfect wave,” as it is regularly referred to in Mr Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer, a film that fetishises Jeffreys Bay as something akin to surf’s Holy Grail.

“As surfers, we’re super fortunate as we end up travelling quite a lot,” Mr February says. “And, it’s funny, because you’re obviously focused on good waves and it really doesn’t matter where they are, but you find yourself in a new place with new people and food and music.”

As he describes in the video, Mr February thinks of each surf spot as possessing its own terroir, a culture that is best experienced through the sport and its camaraderie. “I’ve experienced a lot of places through meeting people in the water, the people who introduce you to the whole package. You only feel like you have arrived really when you step into the water.”