Surfing in Senegal

Senegal is a peninsula with two coasts on it, and that is the whole reason it is worth a week. Dakar runs two kilometres out into the Atlantic and its shores face north and south, so the swell that closes one side opens the other.

From November to March the North Atlantic sends its winter swell onto the north shore: Ngor and Yoff, reefs and a beach a few minutes apart. From May to September the southern hemisphere sends smaller swell onto the south shore, and Ouakam works instead. April and October are the hinges. Almost nowhere else lets you change ocean by driving fifteen minutes.

The water is the surprise. Dakar is at fourteen degrees north, which sounds like boardshorts, and the Canary Current upwells cold along this coast: 19 to 22°C in mid-March, 28 to 29°C in late September. The cold arrives with the good swell, so the best months here are the ones you need rubber for, and the warmest water comes with the smallest waves.

What Senegal is not is a reliable coast. Even Ngor, the best-known break in the country, comes clean seven days out of thirty in its cleanest month. That is Ireland's kind of arithmetic under a tropical sun, and it means a week here is decided by a forecast rather than by a calendar.

What it is instead is close. Dakar is under six hours from Paris with no time difference worth the name, it has a city behind the beach, and the line-ups are a fraction of what the same wave quality would draw in Morocco.