If you’ve ever had a good teacher at school, or a bad one, you’ll have experienced what I’m about to write about.
I was going to pen a general surfing article about Nick Pike, the man behind The Dawnie, prolific Daily Dispatch columnist, surf scribe and on-air wave forecaster at Link FM.
I doubt any member of the local surfing community doesn’t know Nick or know of Nick; even without all his articles and surf reports, he is almost omnipresent along our coast, and can be found wherever there are waves to be had, from Corner to Yellows, the Transkei to Mpekweni.
About halfway through our chat at Spargs’ Bean Tree Café — which had already covered quite a bit of his illustrious surf career, starting as a frothing, fixated grom, surfing SA Champs contests most years over the past 40 years, up to and including the recent Masters SA Champs in Kommetjie, picking up provincial and SA colours — I asked him when he started writing, and why.
Actually, my question was: “Did you like English at school?”
To which Nick replied: “I was a rotten child at primary school. I was a delinquent child. I never learned to spell. ADHD hadn’t been ‘invented’ yet but I’m the poster child,” he said.
“And because I never learned to spell, and maybe my grammar was a little sideways, my written work used to come back from the teacher with red marks for spelling and green marks for grammar.
“All my work came back looking like the Battle of Blood River, and you could see the depth of the marks of the red pen where the teacher had really gotten angry about it.”
If a little encouragement can nurture talent from a young age, that teacher inspired despondency and disinterest.
And then the opposite happened in high school at Selborne College, when English teacher Rory Boyle challenged the boys’ bored thinking, and set Nick on a course of believing in his abilities to articulate.
“We walked into his class on the first day of English in standard 8 (grade 10) and there’s an essay topic on the board — ‘The 20th century is completely devoid of humanity. Discuss.’
“This was a radically refreshing, stimulating, outrageously thought-provoking essay topic, so different from anything we’d ever seen in our lives. I was challenged, stimulated, entertained, excited.
“I gave it horns and I think it came back with a mark of 79%, with no red pen marks, no green pen marks. The comment was, ‘Good discussion, good essay’, and it was the best mark I’d ever seen in my life. And that was it. English changed for me there.”
My attention, already captured, was now rapt.
The same thing, almost verbatim, happened to me.
Average in all subjects in primary school, it was my high school English teacher, Anthony Lavoipierre, who picked up that I had a flair for the language and he encouraged me to write.
It was the first time any teacher had really noticed this skill and talent from which I now earn a living, and I trace the change in my trajectory from average to professional back to that particular teacher in that moment in time.
So here we are. I was going to write a story about how Nick and I both love surfing, him a bit more measured about the sport now whereas I am completely fixated, and it turns out we have more than a love of the ocean in common.
At some point in both our lives, a teacher took notice and nurtured a talent for creative expression through language.
For me, a teacher’s attention was the catalyst for a career in writing for a living, first as a journo and now a copywriter.
For Nick, it set him on a journey where words have informed and entertained surfers, anglers, swimmers, paddlers and more for decades.
From writing surf reports for the Rhodes Surf Club back in the 1980s, all through his life Nick has been writing and reporting alongside his day jobs.
He is currently in technical sales of building products with Protech Eastern Cape, and has been in sales or management for most of his working life.
The media fun and games are his side hustle and where his creative juices flow to the delight of his many readers, listeners and subscribers.
You can catch Nick on Link FM (97.1) for a daily surf forecast and read a weekly article in the Daily Dispatch, At the Beach, on Thursdays.
While I enjoy his articles, the daily surf forecast WhatsApp group, The Dawnie, co-founded by Nick and journo and oceanophile Mike Loewe in 2021, is especially delightful and informative.
Thank you Rory Boyle and Anthony Lavoipierre, and thank you to all the teachers like them who don’t just teach but who actually care. Happy Teacher Appreciation Month.
