A passion for water sports

Sorry for the incredible lateness of this blog entry.  We’ve been back from Dakhla for a while now. The end of the trip was awesome!

We had incredible conditions for the last couple of weeks in Dakhla and surprise surprise the other two managed to stay fit for all of it. I hope that you have all seen the video of our successes and wipeouts a little further down the blog!

The drive back was significantly less fun than the drive down. De rigging the marquee and packing up was all very depressing. We had a great deal of help for Isa, one of the beach guardians.The drive to Marakesh went pretty well, the Ricky Gervais podcasts again keeping us very amused. Once we reached Marakesh Ricky’s map reading skills failed us (standard) and we found ourselves totally lost. Marakesh it turns out is the most poorly signposted city in the world. After 4 hours of being lost we eventually found a sign for the airport, which as it turns out, was only 50m from the entrance to the airport. We dropped Ricky off which was a mega bummer and Tom and I continued on to Moulay, another 4hours down the road. This meant that Tom and I had been in the car for getting on 30hours when we arrived. This particular leg of the journey was in 47 degree heat and may I just remind you that our air conditioning had not worked from day one.

When we arrived in Moulay there was no wind, I think we would have been far too knackered anyway. The next day we had some 4.2 to 4.7 type conditions and some nice ramps for jumping. Tom sailed pretty well and got involved with some forwards. I was a being a bit of a wimp and concentrated on back loops. I made some progress though; sometimes over rotating, sometimes under rotating. Tom gave me a load of flack over lunch about not doing any forwards. Unfortunately we were both a little underpowered after lunch and nothing much really happened.

Day two was windier and I made up for being a wuss the day before and did a fair few forwards whilst continuing my assault on back loops. Boujmaa was out and was doing loads of doubles and huge back loops. Tom continues the experimentation that I started in Daklha with hooked in forwards. We can again conclusively conclude that they don’t work (or you have to be insanely skilled). Tom because he is the most unlucky man alive (he must have done many evil things in a past life) perforated his ear drum. This meant that he had to stay off the water for two weeks.

The third day there was less wind but there was a proper swell coming in. I went out on my 4.7 and there were some big logo high waves coming in and peeling nicely. There were only a few of us out so there were loads of waves to catch. It was my first day of proper wave riding and I really enjoyed it but I think that day two was the most fun because of the awesome jumping. We had a BBQ in the evening which would rather sculpt the remainder of our trip.

We left the next day because the wind was dying and headed for Ceuta. About halfway there I started to feel pretty ropey. Tom managed to get another speeding fine (typical) after we had run out of dirhams. We managed to bribe the police man with £10 English pounds which we assured him was worth 400dirhams (actually worth 120). We did our usual trick of missing our ferry by 1minute and having to wait for the next one. We slept in a service station near Malaga. This was not the grand return to Spain we had anticipated. This was because we were too late and by now I was pretty ill. From about week one in Dakhla we had been dreaming of the 16ounze steak we were going to get on our return to Spain. A soggy, stale sandwich from a late night petrol station was not quite the stuff of our dreams. Because I was so ill Tom had to do a heroic stint behind the wheel though Spain and France. The drive went well except for in Madrid and we missed a ferry in Bologne by 5 minutes. We made it back to Windsor in the middle of the night. And the next day we were straight down to Bray Lake to buy more Windsurfing gear and for our first pint of beer in nearly three months and the Fifield.

All in all an awesome trip we never stopped loving the windsurfing so bring on next year!

Contributed by: Jack