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academia and surfing

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Anderson, Simon

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angle

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Beschen, Shane

Small subtropical Indian Ocean island nation located 330 miles east of Madagascar; best known to surfers as home to Tamarin Bay, the fickle but magnificent left-breaking reef wave featured in the 1974 surf travel film The Forgotten Island of Santosha. 

Mauritius gets its best surf between May and September, from swells originating in the Indian Ocean's Roaring 40s. Most of the two dozen surf breaks located along the island's 110-mile coastline are reef-pass waves that are often compromised or made unridable by the prevailing southeast trade-winds. 

While Tamarin Bay, located on the southwest coast, is angled so that the winds blow offshore, incoming swells have to bend sharply around the coast before hitting the reef, and the waves are thus much smaller here than almost anywhere else in the area: Tamarin only hits peak form about 20 days on an average season, and rarely gets above eight foot. But when conditions are right, the wave at Tamarin peels dreamlike across the reef for nearly 300 yards, in a series of exquisite tube sections. A 1989 issue of Surfing magazine named Tamarin Bay as one of the "25 Best Waves in the World." 

Average midday temperatures in Mauritius range from the low 70s to the mid-80s; water temperatures range from 70 to 80. Sharp reefs are the island's primary surfing hazard, and many of the breaks are too shallow to ride at low tide. Pioneering French surfer Joel de Rosnay was the first to ride Tamarin Bay in 1958, using an old Australian-made plywood surfboard. De Rosnay wrote about Mauritius in a 1963 Surfer magazine article, and the unnamed Tamarin lefts were featured in Sea of Joy, a 1971 surf film. Three years later California surfer/filmmaker Larry Yates wrote "The Forgotten Island of Santosha," a Surfer cover story featuring Hawaiian champion Joey Cabell. 

"Santosha," a Hindustani world for "peace," was Yates's pseudonym for Tamarin Bay, and both the article and the like-titled film presented the island as the ultimate exotic surf destination. Yates noted that "Santosha is not a place, but a state of mind," striking a phrase that would become a mantra for the hundreds of Santosha-inspired surfers who set out to find their own perfect wave. The Yates/Cabell excursion itself was listed by Surfer in 1995 as one of the top 10 surf trips of all time. 

Mauritius had two surf shops and more than 100 native surfers by 2003, most of them French Mauritian and local Creole. Resident surfers have earned a reputation as being among the most territorial in the world, particularly a loosely formed group known as the "White Shorts," and visiting surfers can expect to be ignored, harangued, or worse.

Mauritius

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews