Surfing in Morocco in January

January is what the Taghazout points were built for. Low-pressure systems crossing the North Atlantic send swell that has travelled a long way, with the push to wrap around a headland and peel down it; the short summer swells leave Anchor Point flat. Counting only the clean days, a surfable swell with a wind that does not chop it up, Anchor Point gives four in a week and La Baie at Imsouane five days out of seven, the best figure any wave on this coast reaches in any month.

Everybody knows it, and the price of January is the company. Crowds and prices are at their yearly high, and Anchor Point fills the moment it turns on, with rocks in the line-up. The way around the queue is to spread out: Killer Point, north of the village, carries the same winter walls three days in seven and very rarely gets crowded, because the paddle-out takes twenty minutes on a big day.

Getting here is short. Agadir is a three-hour flight from much of Europe and Taghazout is forty-five minutes from the airport, so a Saturday flight still puts you in the water on Sunday morning. The sea is 18°C: a 3/2 full suit covers a lesson, a 4/3 keeps you in once sessions stretch past two hours. Warmer water in January means a long-haul flight; Morocco gives up a few degrees for a journey of an afternoon.

The week runs on the morning: the offshore blows early, and everybody who read the same forecast is out with you. The sun gives about seven and a half hours a day, among the least of the year, but the air reaches 21°C. In the evening Taghazout's communal camps put everyone round one table, which is how people who arrive alone leave with a group. Book the camp before the flight: in January the good ones fill first.

For an experienced surfer, January in Taghazout is the month the village was built around, and the only real question is how to share it. Anchor Point is clean four days out of seven, a long right off a rocky headland that works around low tide on a north-west groundswell. Hash Point, Killer Point and Boilers each give three. What takes the other days differs from one break to the next, and that is the useful part: Hash Point, sheltered at the top of the village, loses its days to a swell too small to reach it, while the exposed points lose theirs to the wind.

That difference plans the week for you. On a stormy day, when the open coast is chopped up, Hash Point is where something surfable is found, a walk from most of the camps, with an entry over rocks that calls for booties. On a day the wind turns onshore in the village, Boilers, twelve kilometres north towards Cap Ghir, sits in a wind channel formed by the foothills of the Atlas and is rarely onshore when everything else is; it breaks over reef, close to the rusting boiler of the wreck that named it. Killer Point, between the two, is the heaviest and most pitching wave of the region, works at every tide, and belongs to the people who surf it all year. The offshore is a morning wind, and at Anchor Point the morning is shared with everybody who read the same chart.

Sleep in Taghazout at this level. The points are ten minutes apart by shuttle, and a house near Hash Point and Anchor Point puts the dawn session on foot. Camps run from 21 € a night to 110 €, and over a week the gap between them is mostly what is included rather than what the rooms are like. Imsouane is the day out, ninety minutes north, where Cathedral Point gives three days on a shorter, faster right that barrels at low tide. If the crowd is what puts you off, December is the better month for Killer Point and Boilers, and March is the same swell with a shorter queue.