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Must Watch: The Shocking Truth Behind 'The Endless Summer'

Originally posted on SURFER | By Jake Howard | Last updated Jun 24, 2025 2:14 PM ET

After selling his car, his TV, and all other worldly possessions, in 1958 Dick Metz set out to see the world. Originally from Laguna Beach, he hopped trains and hitchhiked from Southern California through Mexico. Mind you, Jack Kerouac’s seminal “On The Road” had only been published the year prior and this kind of vagabond travel was well outside the strait-laced American norms of the time.

Metz eventually landed in Panama, where he scored a ticket on a troop transport full of French Foreign Legionnaires over to Tahiti (the troops were headed to Vietnam, but that’s a different story). From there he hopped freighters throughout the South Pacific to islands such as Apia, Pago Pago, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Fiji and Tonga before eventually landing in Australia.

But the real plot twist comes when Metz eventually lands in Africa, and it’s this portion of his travels that is the focus of the documentary, “Birth Of The Endless Summer: Discovery Of The Cape St. Francis” by director Richard Yelland. After an extensive run of screenings at film festivals and movie houses around the country, the film is now available worldwide on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube Movies, Fandango, and Vimeo on Demand.

“For three or four days, we drove from Arusha across Tanganyika and into the Rhodesias. Finally, in the middle of the night, the driver wakes me up. I was sound asleep, and he said, ‘Well, here we are at Victoria Falls. That’s where you wanted to get out,” recalls Metz. “I looked out the window, it’s one in the morning, there were a couple of fires and two or three little huts like there are in all these little villages. Of course, no lights, nobody around, no buildings of any kind, just little huts.”

It’s at this part in Metz’s story where serendipity steps in. Rather than sit alone in the dark, Metz endeavored to see the coast. His driver was headed to Cape Town. So Metz headed south too and eventually lucked into a chance meeting with one of the few surfers in town, John Whitmore (who is largely credited as the father of South African surfing).

“There was a guy out about 50 yards on what I thought was a surfboard, but it really didn’t look like a surfboard,” Metz says. “So, when this guy swam up to me and I said, ‘This is the ugliest surfboard I’ve ever seen.’”

“He responded, ‘Well, what the hell do you know about surfboards? Who are you?’”

“I told him I was from Hawaii and Southern California,” Metz says.

Quickly striking up a friendship that would last a lifetime, over the next few weeks they surfed together. At one point, Whitmore recommended that Metz go check this spot called Cape St. Francis. It wasn’t exactly all-time when Metz got there, but it was enticing enough that when he eventually returned back to the U.S. he recommended the spot to his friend, filmmaker Bruce Brown, who was in the planning stages of a new around-the-world surf movie project.

“Had I not gone to Cape Town—Bruce, Mike [Hyson] and Robert [August] might not have scored perfect Cape Saint Francis in The Endless Summer. It’s funny the way the ball bounces,” Metz surmises. “That particular moment was the key decision that changed the lives of tens of thousands of people in the surfing world.”