Air Azimuth

By Michael H. Kew

We anchored in a channel with surf breaking over a reef on each side, and it didn’t take long to get the board unloaded. While I clicked away with my camera, Geoff made it through several tight tubes, turning on with head dips. The whole routine really stoked a native crowd gathered on the shore… so stoked they gave Geoff a ride back to the yacht in the head man’s outrigger canoe. Upping anchor, we motored the yacht into the small settlement of Dzaoudzi over glassy water with the smell of flowers heavy in the air.

—Ron Perrott, Surfer, November 1967

Surfer, November 1967. (Main: Attoumani and one of the world’s largest baobabs.)

SEED OF FORTUITY was a ‘help wanted’ note inside the smoky bar of an old Durban yacht club where two young Australians were downing beer, looking for something to do, someplace new to go. Their escape flashed on the white scrap of paper.

And so August 1967 found photographer Ron Perrott and surfer Geoff White volunteering to crew on the Kyalami, a 46-foot trimaran bound for Greece via the Red Sea, Seychelles, and the East African coast. First came the Mozambique Channel, a thousand miles of turbulent blue dotted with atolls and volcanic isles. Four of these—Grande Comore (aka Ngazidja), Mohéli (Mwali), Anjouan (Ndzuani), and Mayotte (Maore)—comprised the French colony of Comoros, a routine port of call for boats cruising the channel’s north entrance. Was off Mayotte where after a month of sailing Perrott and White became the proported first surfers to ride Comorian waves that I, one of just five passengers, decades later could clearly see through the window of a 64-seat turboprop as it descended toward Dzaoudzi–Pamandzi International Airport. From Dar es Salaam our plane soared in slow-motion over the three neighboring and now-independent Comorian isles, eliciting memories of my explorations there with a cosmopolitan crew during another surf trip in another life.

Lush little Anjouan was the trio’s gem, home to the varied reef pass and the black-sand beachbreak, the slabby point, the wind-sheltered cove. Raw roads wound through thick forests of breadfruit and coconut; past tangled plantations of banana, ylang ylang, coffee, nutmeg, cassava, vanilla, taro, avocado, cinnamon, jasmine, mango; alongside rocky creeks and gushing waterfalls; through villages of mud huts, chickens scrambling across the road, grass-munching goats, everyone smiling and waving at this motley truckload of mzungus bound deeply into the dream of a surf-rich Comorian coast.

Exploring a western Indian Ocean island during peak swell season is always iffy. Even if the constant onshore trades can calm for a spell, the tides can be wrong or the swell angle skewed, or it can be impossible to reach a certain spot without a boat. On Anjouan this was precisely the case. Facing our quarters were three potentially epic reefbreaks if the correct elements ever coalesced (they didn’t). Each day we were forced to ring our driver/fixer for a ride elsewhere; with the wind howling stiffly and constantly from the same direction, few accessible spots were surfable. Same general theme on Grand Comore, Mohéli, and, yes, Mayotte.

A fatal kink in Perrott’s ‘67 yarn was the fact that on Mayotte (now a contentious département of overseas France) there was and is no reef pass remotely within the eyesight of a shorebound “native crowd.” The passes are all miles out. Decades later, White admitted he wasn’t sure he’d even surfed in Comoros. “Wouldn’t have been anything special,” he told me. “If there was surf, it would’ve been just a crumbly windswell. Nothing I can remember.”

In 2015 South Africa’s Zigzag published sailor Rian Greeff’s “Moored in Mayotte.” Besides the Perrott quip in Surfer, Greeff’s was the first Mayotte surf tale I’d ever seen. “After getting severely skunked in southern Madagascar,” he wrote, “and after not surfing for more than a month, we were desperate. We just wanted to surf—we didn’t care what.”

Grande-Terre is Mayotte’s main island and from space resembles a caged seahorse, the “cage” a huge coral barrier reef. Embedded in the reef’s northeast corner, Dzaoudzi’s home isle of Petite-Terre looks like a white cartoon fart cloud shot from the seahorse’s (Grande-Terre) ass. One boozy eve at the Dzaoudzi yacht club, Greeff and his brother were urged by an expat bodyboarder and a goat-boater ami to drop everything and go surfing. The Greeffs spent the next day motoring from Dzaoudzi’s harbor to Passe Sada, a shapely right-hander 35 miles away on the opposite side of Grande-Terre and its lagune, the Indian Ocean’s largest.

They scored—somewhat:

(Courtesy Rian Greeff.)

 Our French connections weren’t exaggerating. Looking at the waves from the safety of the channel we could clearly see poo-erful barrels rolling along evenly as they hugged the pass. Rights on one side, lefts on the other. It was at least four- to six-foot. We immediately dropped anchor, put the motor on the dinghy, and waxed our boards. As we approached the lineup, a set suddenly reared up and exploded across the reef in a decidedly menacing way. This was a wave unlike any I had seen. This was the stuff of movies, the magazines, only better because there were no pros or cameras around—just me and my boet. We hadn’t sailed across the Mozambique Channel one and a half times over, plus done another nine hours of motoring, to watch empty waves roll by. Nooit, we were there to surf. Even if it killed us, which it looked like it might.

(Courtesy Rian Greeff.)

 From my home in Oregon I emailed Rian.

“Ja, bru,” he replied from Durban, “if you have a bit of money and speak French, it shouldn’t be a problem to get out to the waves. Otherwise it might be a bit tricky and quite expensive. You could probably charter a small fishing boat from the eastern beaches to take you to the reefs.”

A few years later, at the makeshift bar in that same small Dzaoudzi yacht club, edging a small mangroved anchorage of sailboat silhouettes in ruddy dusk, I met a Breton named Martin who had lived in Mayotte for eight years employed as boat skipper/refitter and schoolteacher. He surfed, too, so I inquired about the forecast. I’d seen lots of Mayotte surf footage, by far the best from Passe Sada and Passe aux Bateaux in le récif du sud-ouest.

In a curly accent, Martin spoke slowly.

“Yeah, best waves are in the southwest. You have to get on a boat. Pretty hard to get there, but once you’re there, it’s…well, I can give you some contacts. What we do is we take a car to the southwest of the big island. From there we take a fisherman who takes us out for the whole day. He stays in the boat and waits for us to finish surfing. I could give you this contact and a contact of my friends, too. If there’s a swell coming, they’ll get there. But not this month. They’re all in Madagascar.”

“It’d seem logical,” I posited, “that a boat could be hired from the dive center on the beach at Jardin Maoré Resort as it’s just eight miles in from Passe aux Bateaux and Passe Sada.”

“The beach there is where only tourists go. No locals. No fishermen. There is no village. Just the hotel. I wouldn’t even ask the hotel or the dive center. I know they would never take me. It’s not their business.”

“How much do you pay a fisherman?”

“Normally 140 euros for the day, but it can be up to eight persons in one boat. Cheap to share the cost. You can hire him to take you to the reef to surf or to do anything—fish, dive, snorkel, swim, go to other islands in the lagoon. But no fishermen speak English and everything is weather-dependent.”

It was a Monday evening. The week’s chart promised two days of southwest groundswell.

“You are leaving for Madagascar on Wednesday?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“And every other Mayotte surfer here is there on holiday?”

“Yeah.”

“So I’m on my own.”

“Yeah.”

A few mornings later I walked to a café for strong coffee and weak wifi. The day’s cryptic marine forecast: La mer est un peu agitée ou trés agitée, surtout en dehors de la lagune [“The sea is a little agitated or very agitated, especially outside the lagoon”]. Low tide midday. Mostly sunny. Buoyweather’s new chart revealed the aforementioned swell—five feet at 14 seconds—present for the next two days.

As I rose to leave my iPhone chirped with an email from a man named Nicolas, a French expat schoolteacher and windsurfer, someone Martin had mentioned.

 Hello Mr. Kew! You are looking for a person with a scooter of sea to lead you on Sada to surfing? I have a scooter, a Sea-Doo GTX with three places. For the service I ask just 60 euros for petrol and 30 euros per hour. It takes 40 minutes to go back and Passe Sada and it all depends on the time you spend on the waves? Count two hours in addition, therefore 120 euros. Bring bottle of water. It is necessary to pay attention to the reefs. Dangerous enough at low tide! Okay have a good day, see you tomorrow.

Nicolas.

My spirits felt buoyed as I stepped into the brown minivan of Attoumani, a local guide. I showed him the surf magazine I brought for visual translation. "Connaissez-vous le surf ici?" (Do you know about surfing here?) He shrugged. Je ne sais pas. Anyway, he was to give me a sort of island tour: Dreamy wide vistas of the listless lagune. Silent blue horizons. Point after cove after beachbreak after refined patch of reef, all of it true nook-and-crannyism, facing all swell angles, most of them with convenient carparks. We traced more bays to the birdy Sazile Peninsula and up the east coast to Bambo Est, a pretty but windy black-sand beach where shrieking children played futbol. Behind them was a perfectly tapered right point backdropped with Sazile’s crocodile-shaped headland. To the east were gaps in the barrier reef, submerged islets of coral that allowed swell between them. Three miles out, this part of the reef was by far the closest to land. Problem was the east-southeast-facing reefs were directly exposed to stiff onshore tradewind, facing indirectly—or not at all—toward any rideable swell.

An hour before sunset we parked at a high vista near the raised amphitheater-arced town of Sada from where I could see no barrier reef, no whitewater. Nothing. A monotone blue lake. Was the reef that far out, I wondered, past the naked eye? Or was there simply...no swell?

I peered through Attoumani’s binoculars.

Pas de vagues.

And then it was Friday which per Buoyweather could indeed usher the last swollen gasp for my trip. Crouched on the beach near my bungalow, the aforementioned Nicolas was found alternating between coffee and cigarette. He was 52, blond, perfect-teethed, stocky, friendly, relaxed. He spoke scant English. Our verbal communication would be sparse but he did say that he—using his Sea-Doo—planned to soon skim the 200 oceanic miles from Mayotte to Madagascar to visit his 26-year-old girlfriend. He had been dating her for four years but she’d never been to Mayotte because she couldn’t get a visa. Hailing from Europe or South Africa? Bienvenue. From Comoros or Madagascar? Importun.

“Des vagues pour le surf?” he asked, pointing at the lagoon. “Allons-y!” (Waves for surfing? Let’s go!)

We waded out to his moored Sea-Doo. In the distant gloom I saw no whitewater but acres of whitecaps—the lagoon a jagged mess. The sky dark and rain-pregnant, the wind hard onshore. Buoyweather’s clean swell vow now seemed mythical.

Out we bounced and banged to the west-northwest. Nicolas drove fast. The ride was violent. Spine-jolting. After about 20 minutes, nearing the reef, we still saw no signs of surf. Nicolas’s head was like a swivel, his eyes darting everywhere, back and forth, for a few minutes scanning in disbelief. He seemed more crushed than I was. Finally he threw up his hands.

“No vagues! Eh, Michel? Eh! No vagues! Eh! Eh!”

He gestured frantically, caffeinatedly ranted in French, pointed back and forth at both sides of the pass. Its flatness puzzled me too—not even knee-high windswell. The entire lagoon looked endless, no delineation between it and the open sea.

Nicolas shook a fist at the bleak scene.

“Fuck fuck fuck! No vagues today! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Brutal run back to shore. Lurched and slammed through the blur, mostly at 40 mph. Back on the beach, using my French-English translation book, Nicolas told me that morning he’d driven his Sea-Doo 25 miles from Petite-Terre, citing the time and cost of rolling a car and trailer onto the ferry then driving hilly roads for an hour to this beach. The return trip would be somewhat downwind, he hoped.

Rainy afternoon. We beered drearily in a dim beach bar. Again aided by my translation book, he told me he’d been born in Central African Republic—his père was a construction inspector there. The family moved often: Senegal, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mali, Corsica. In 1997 Nicolas left his wife and daughter in France. In 2012 he moved to Mayotte to fulfill a youth teaching contract which he later renewed twice. He said he could die here. He saw no reason to leave. Then again, Nicolas was a windsurfer.

“J’aime Mayotte,” he said, smiling, aglow with ale. Or was it lager?

Alone later at my bungalow: meditative thump and sigh of one-foot shorepound. Wind waves in the lagoon’s wide fetch. Dazzling birdsong. Humidity waned as the tide pushed. I fed tart starfruit to lemurs and drank from cold red cans of Three Horses Beer. Beneath ocherous late sky I swam with sea turtles. The plunging Sun seared the silky warm water, its brilliant backdrop a dense wall of greens and browns and stately mutated baobabs, my favorite African tree.

Next morning: no distant whitewater. The lagoon remained infinite, heavily chopped, in July a howl of windy permanence. Still on my own (per Martin), I flipped through my surf magazine and thought perhaps that maybe—just maybe—I should get into kiteboarding.

 Adapted from Cococandescence, future (2023) East Africa volume via Spruce Coast Press.

 First published in Wavelength, issue 262.