Surfing from a Sinking Ship in Mauritania
Surfing from a
Sinking Ship in Mauritania
by Sam
Bleakley
Mauritania is anchored on the North West
African coast like a docked ship awaiting repairs, one side gathering
industrial rust and sinking into the deeply cold Atlantic, the other,
sand-swamped. Like many post-colonial countries, Mauritania is scarred and
searching for an identity by trying to link tradition with progress. While
respecting that the very land itself shifts with time as mountainous dunes are
reshaped by ceaseless wind, people attempt to lay down political boundaries,
these western-Sahara markers no longer moving with the wind, but with the
decisions of bureaucrats who no longer live in the heart of the desert but in
run-down cities at the rim. And there simply is no map for the location of
landmines that litter the access routes to a wealth of incredible pointbreak
waves on the Ras Nouadhibou peninsula in the north. Mauritania is not the
comfort zone that Morocco has become, and this is what attracted our
surfEXPLORE crew.
The desert is a restless body unable to
sleep because of the nagging wind, and we ruffled the body even more with our
driving tyres, racing north to Nouadhibou from the capital Nouakchott, as
opposed to the soft-shuffle, slow moving nomads caravan. Military checkpoints
appeared with unnerving regularity. We planned the weight of the bribe, hoping
we had the right papers and a trigger-happy soldier would not reduce the trip
to a zero. Finally we entered the sprawling cement and sand of Nouadhibou.
Street stalls were adorned by hanging chunks of camel meat and spilled over
with pungent dried fish. Iron ore and fishing are the lifeblood of Mauritania’s
fragile economy, and here was the grinding reality of proto-industrialism and
its inevitable waste.
We bypassed the city for the west coast,
sticking diligently to the tracks to avoid landmines. Flocks of black winged
seagulls wheeled in great clamouring rings, then our jaws dropped as we saw
sandstone reefs and points packed into both directions and a ship’s graveyard.
Paddling out brought us sharply to our senses, as the water was colder than we
expected. There was a long wait between sets that followed a desert rhythm,
slow time. But the waves were incredible when they arrived. The best reeled off
the hull of a wrecked ship, one of hundreds in the area allowed to beach in
insurance scams. The faces were burning blue, like run-around gas. The smoking,
deep waves had hypnotically long tubes, and the crew rode large wide sets
before getting spat out right by the ship’s hull. Later one of the crew boosted
an air, but it was too high to land, so he stepped off, hit the reef and came
up with rust on his wetsuit. The sea turned plum as the days drew on, and we
finally tired of the loud clatter of barrels striking the steel boats, that
showered and pancaked to silence. If you want to focus your horizons on an
alternative to Morocco’s crazy hub, take note, in Mauritania you can surf alone
from a sinking ship on high quality ‘rust breaks’.
