“ Moulay Bouzerktoun has a different energy from most of its surroundings; its positive and negative energies make it very balanced ”
TELL-TALE
Just 25kms north of well known Essaouira on Morocco’s west coast is Moulay Bouzerktoun; a small village with a big reputation for wavesailing thanks in part to being a favourite haunt of Moroccan sensation, Boujmaa Guilloul. Life here wasn’t always about windsurfing and for one local, Abderazaq Labdi, a chance encounter with Pavel Vcislo from the Czech Republic proved pivotal. Boujmaa, Abderazaq and Pavel pick up the tale.
BOUJMAA GUILLOUL
“Moulay Bouzerktoun is my adopted home, when I first got here with Rachid Roussafi in the summer of 1998, I fell in love with the conditions and the whole place, being here felt right and I felt like I needed to come back whenever I had the chance. So whenever I had a little time off I cycled or even ran here with my backpack. I have seen and learned so much in Moulay, and after being to many places in the world, I feel so fortunate to have had the chance to grow up here and call this place home. Moulay Bouzerktoun is a small fishing village whose population convert to farming in the wintertime and has a different energy from most of its surroundings; its positive and negative energies make it very balanced somehow, almost perfect for my perspective. The village is composed of a couple of families, actually, it is only about a hundred and a bit more people that live here the whole year round. Most of them are young adults, they fish, they cultivate the land or some windsurf. When windsurfing started coming to Moulay it was brought by traveling windsurfers and by that, it brought tourism and new income sources. The fathers of the village built shacks on the beach and sold sodas or sandwiches for the windsurfers and the mothers made hats and jumpers from wool that they got from their sheep and these were sold by their kids on the beach to the windsurfing tourists. They also sold bread or cakes to those camping on the beach. In the beginning, the infrastructure was very basic, an unpaved road to get there, but there was amazing conditions on the water. The first indigenous people windsurfing back then were the village’s fishermen who picked up the sport really quickly, using gear left behind from European tourists to encourage locals into the sport. That was followed by the village’s youth a summer later, because winter time is for school and the conditions are mostly too hardcore to learn.