On Friday, new surfers arrive in the city by the score for their first national festival.
The Granny Grommets movement has been around for a while, but at Nahoon a few bodyboarding, ocean-loving over-50-year-olds decided to get it going here and then throughout SA.
The original famous four, led by photographer, beach lover and swim teacher Julie Schroeter, inspired waves of women to go down to the beach and get happily washed, rinsed and tumbled in the foamies.
The first national Salt & Sisterhood Granny Grommets Festival is going to be a wild, creative, social weekend for women who arrive in mixed teams and will spend Saturday in the surf, hanging out and socialising on Nahoon Beach, followed by an evening presentation and shindig.
One of the women has had a trained eye on the movement and has recorded their stories and local histories, which will be published in a book soon.
She is Dr Marinei Nola Herselman, a lecturer in social work at Fort Hare University.
Deloris asked her to tell us all about the book, and she penned the following piece in response.
It answers some of the deep questions, which makes this ocean-based social phenomenon even more profound and amazing.
Marinei says her own story threads through the collection, but she is one voice among many, a testimony from women who arrived carrying divorce, caregiving, illness, loneliness and loss.
And they then found “in this sisterhood” something unexpected — adventure, belonging, unguarded laughter.
This is Marinei’s story:
On a bitterly cold June morning in 2024, two sisters sat together in silence.
Their mother had just died, and her death reopened older wounds.
Both had spent their working lives helping others through pain, one a child-protection social worker, the other a social worker across SA and the US.
Knowing how to carry other people’s grief, it turns out, offers little protection against your own.
Granny Grommets: The Tribe You Didn’t Know You Needed: Ritual, Resilience, and the Women Who Keep Coming Back is the book that grew out of that morning.
Part memoir, part oral history, part love letter to a stretch of East London coastline, it tells the story of an extraordinary, ordinary group of women, grandmothers, teachers, nurses, retirees, widows and businesswomen, all over 50, who gather every Friday at Nahoon Beach to ride the waves on brightly coloured boards.
Almost by accident, they have built one of the most joyful community movements the city has seen in years.
The name carries its own charm.
In surf slang a “grommet” is a young surfer still learning the ropes.
The original Granny Grommets began roughly 25 years ago in Albany, Western Australia, when a surfing instructor noticed older women being quietly left out of surf culture, the lessons aimed at teenagers, while women over 50 watched from the shore, thinking, ‘I’d love to try that.’
She handed them the boards. Old enough for reading glasses, young enough for waves.
In August 2023, Julie Schroeter and a few friends wanted nothing more than regular ocean time, no pressure, no plan, just women, waves, and a little mid-life rebellion.
The first session drew four. Within months, there were dozens, then more than a hundred, and by 2024, at least six sister groups had formed along the coast, from Port Alfred to the Western Cape, the Garden Route and KwaZulu-Natal.
Boogie Bug is the Nahoon Granny Grommets’ beloved mascot, a little ball of mud washed in by the tide at Nahoon Corner, rescued from the surf by Sally and lovingly scrubbed back to life by Bev, until a face and a personality emerged.
Named by Ali Baxter and fitted with her own beach chair and Granny Grommet vest, she is proof of what the tribe does best, noticing the forgotten, half-buried things and giving them a home.
The book insists that the real story cannot be captured by membership numbers.
It lives in smaller, wetter moments, the giggling that starts before anyone’s even in the water; the graceless tumble off a board when a wave has other ideas; the bumping and tangling as bodies and boards collide in the white water; the indignity of a fin to the shin and the laughter that follows it.
A woman catches her first wave at 68, a granny asking a security guard to help her remove her wetsuit, a widow laughs properly again, undressing only to notice much later that a young man was sitting in the car.
A nervous newcomer is pulled into the circle with “Come, girl. You’re one of us now!’ running down the beloved new-member hospitality squad.
At heart, this is a book about visibility, about a stage of life that society too often treats as a quiet winding down.
Women over 50, it argues, are not finished. They are becoming something different, and the sea is where many of them remember it.
It is also a book about grief, and how a community quietly metabolises it.
The Grommets are stewards of the coast they love, too.
The book documents their March 2025 protest against raw sewage entering the ocean at Nahoon, hand-lettered cardboard, blue shirts, and a message in seaweed too large to ignore: SEWAGE STINKS.
How Orient Beach became the playground of women sliding down the waterway, being children again, but with so much more wisdom. The collection ranges widely.
Tender personal essays sit beside unapologetic silliness, full-moon swims, campouts, lost car keys.
There is poetry, recipes, a playlist, and a foreword from JP Veaudry, the 2024 ISA World Para Surfing Champion, who calls the group “local, lekker, and absolutely delightful”.
Ultimately, Granny Grommets is an invitation to step into their world, a world where the ocean heals, where laughter travels across water, and where growing older is received not as diminishment but as the opening of a new and bolder chapter.
So take up your board, real or metaphorical, and allow yourself to be carried by the Granny Grommets: a sisterhood that understands, in their bones and in their laughter, that life’s greatest waves were always meant to be ridden together.
* Dr Herselman compiled, wrote and edited the volume as a tribute to her late mother “and to every woman over fifty”.
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