Discovered: perfect uncrowded waves!

Everywhere’s crowded. It ain’t even a joke. You’ll fly across the globe for 20 hours, jump a domestic flight and then an overnight boat charter and you’ll wake up to the fabled perfect waves you’ve seen in surf mags… with thirty surfers.

Who needs it!

So what if I told you there was a gorgeous tropical island, so perfect there in the southern Indian, near Mauritius, near Madagascar, that hosted dozens of empty waves. Dozens. I so don’t shit you!

If you were there today, for instance, you’d ride a perfect lefthand reef, empty, a wave that lights up through July and August by those southern-hemi winter south swells.

Where is this paradise? Okay, here’s the rub. Reunion Island. More attacks than Western Australia, Byron Bay and South Africa. Home to an infestation of rabid bull sharks, pugnacious thugs unlike any other shark in the ocean. Quick to attack, slow to let go.

In April, one of the island’s best young surfers, 13-year-old Elio Canestri was hit. Killed in front of his seven friends. Fourteen attacks, seven fatals, in the last few years. Tourism, surfing, is dead on Reunion.

But it wasn’t always this way.

For a time there in the nineties Reunion was the most exotic stop on the world tour. Difficult to access, usually via Jo-berg in South African, which was already 20-plus hours from anywhere, and being an overseas department of France meant it had a demographic that was part French and part Creole (quick lesson! Creole is the name given to anyone born on the island whatever their ethnicity, but this could be anything from Chinese to Malagasy to African and Indian).

Reunion isn’t a world different to Tahiti, mountainous, blue-water reef passes and bound up with all the good French bits (food culture, education, language) without any of the stiff French formality.

Anyway, so the tour came and went, but what didn’t change was how rad this volcanic jewel is. Waves? You’ve got ’em everywhere. Kai Neville’s 2009 movie The Modern Collective showed that it was more than just St Leu; that a short drive south you could be jumping off the biggest ramps anyone had ever seen – and no one out.

Yeah, it always had a rep for sharks. It’s the Indian Ocean. It’s tropical. Like  Madagascar. Like Mauritius. Attacks happened but they were predictable. Surfers were smart enough to avoid the east coast, to avoid surfing after rains that muddied the water and by staying out of the drink at dawn and dusk. An attack here and there, but years apart, and only occasionally fatal.

But in 2007, a 19km stretch of marine reserve was created on the west coast. Nothing could be touched, shark, coral, whatever. Shark attacks spiked. And all either in or close by the new marine reserve.

Surfers are leaving the island en masse, to mainland France, to wherever, to anywhere. The number of regular surfers and bodyboarders on Reunion has dropped from over 5000 to around 60. There use to be 13 surf schools on the island. Now there’s three. One surf shop that’d sell bodyboards in the hundreds in a season has sold three in a year.

And you know what that means? Uncrowded lineups! Perfect tropical waves where you’ll beg for another person to surf with. An old gem becomes a New Classic!

Sure, the sharks are there, but isn’t there an inherent risk every time we dive into the ocean?

Anyway, if it freaks you out too much surf on Wednesday and Saturday. Vigie requin (government employed free divers with spears) patrol popular surf spots. If a shark is spotted whistles are blown and the water cleared. The vigie requin are even trained to deal with trauma. ie. sudden amputations.

Win, win…