Saudi’s Surf Pioneers
Unbelievably, it’s been almost six years since I first arrived on the shores of Al Khafji, KSA. With suits and shirts in my case and a surfboard under my arm, I had a strong feeling surfing would be possible in this remote city on the Kuwaiti border. The teacher who had recommended me for the job mentioned seeing waves fit for body boarding and YouTube films showed small swell lines wrapping in. Also, I had spent a lot of time researching wind and swell movements in the Arabian Gulf on Google. However, I hadn’t expected to surf quite as much as I managed across the years and, even more so, to feature in famous magazines and blogs as the Kingdom’s only surfer. Far more than for myself, Khafji offered a lot to a surfer as young and light as my son, Rafael. It enabled him to surf fairly frequently through the winter in a wetsuit and even offered some fun days in board shorts during the warmer spring months. While surf sessions often turned into a cat and mouse game with the police w...