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MOULAY: WAVE CLASSIC MOULAY

Sergio Alonso Minuth from Sailboards Tarifa gives us the lowdown on the inaugural Wave Classic Moulay in Morocco, an event with giving back to the local community at its core.

WORDS – Sergio Alonso Minuth // PHOTOS – @pacodlacorte

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I went to Moulay for the first time thirty years ago for windsurfing, and I was so stoked with the sailing and couldn’t believe there was such good conditions so close to Spain. So every year I travel there as many times as I can and have met many other like-minded windsurfers there in that time, crazy, authentic people, just there for their love of windsurfing.

Grass roots

I’ve also made a lot of connections and relations with local people and myself and some other regular windsurfing visitors try to help them as much as we can to windsurf. Before this, no local people went windsurfing. It’s been a long-term project facilitated by passionate windsurfing tourists giving them old windsurf equipment so they can start sailing. Sometimes they get a boom made from different boom parts, just one sail for strong and light wind, or they only have one board, volume not important! It’s very pure windsurfing. For example I’ve known local ripper Soufiane Sahili since he was running on the beach at 3 years old. I saw windsurfing was an opportunity for him and other locals to get to know new people, learn new languages and a lot of those people are now working in surf/kite/windsurf schools, and thanks to windsurfing, they have had the opportunity to grow and have success in their lives and earn money too.

Event idea

The idea to take all this further and run an event in Moulay has been running in my head for years, and I decided that this year was the time to finally do it, and we did! And honestly, it was fantastic, especially for the ambience and the people around it; it really was an authentic windsurfing event, no egos, no stars, just windsurfing!

Soufiane Sahili emerged the winner and once again showed the world how good he really is. Limited by funding and the very significant challenges of trying to get travel visas as a young Moroccan man, Soufiane has had only limited opportunity to travel to the big international events for his chance to shine on the world stage. With this new unified IWT / PWA tour, smaller events like ours can get global attention. This is the point. Let the people shine. Regardless of their circumstances, celebrate them all. Riders near and far, rich and poor, lucky and unlucky, everyone can shine and we celebrate you all.

Thanks

I was stoked with how a lot of foreign people got involved to help the event run, just for fun. We all worked for free, just putting in efforts and money to move forward with the event. Thanks to all of them, especially @pacodlacorte (photos), Bruno from Magic Fun Moulay and Youssef from Yousurf Essaouira.

I want to have an event like this running for the next few years, with nice people that want to come, enjoy themselves and connect to the fantastic local people in this cool and friendly town. After this first event, we learned a lot, we have some issues with authorities and other local problems, small ones, but now we know how it all works, we want to prepare a bigger and better event. We will run it from the 28^th of April to the 4^th of May in 2024, and you can follow us on Facebook – wave classic moulay.

Support

We will grow the event for the benefit of windsurfers and local riders and the Moulay community. All money raised will be entirely spent in the town. Now after a successful first event, I have had offers from more people to get involved and offer support for free and help organize it! In the future we will give prize money, but only for local people, all tourists pay a small fee to participate and Moroccans don’t pay anything. If we get a good sponsor, we will invest any money into buying gear for the small kids and to make a festival in the town, getting the food from local houses (Moroccan home cooking is incredible), so we get the town involved and get them paid for this too. We will make an event T-shirt too, and all the money we get from selling it will also be invested in the event. So far only small companies and shops in Tarifa have supported us, but we would welcome any bigger sponsors that want to get involved.

Donations

From our warehouse in Sailboards Tarifa we keep any donations from customers like sails, masts, booms, boards, harnesses and small wetsuits that we bring to Moulay for the kids. Also we bring sometimes old sails that people have left in our loft, which we repair for free; all these small things can help the local young sailors a lot. I was stoked to see during my last visit, two little kids trying to cross the 2 metre shorebreak with no fin, no wetsuit and a sail that was cut down to make it really small, under 2.0m, and they fought with the waves, over and over again to try and get out, that’s the real spirit of windsurfing and why we like to support kids like them.

Plan

So the plan is to make the Wave Classic Moulay an event for windsurfers to party, have fun and make new friends in the best atmosphere, where everyone is welcome from amateur to pro riders. It’s an opportunity to connect with genuinely good people and have a good time in some of the best conditions in the world, and at this point of the year, we are proud to say that we got some of the best conditions for a wave sailing event in 2023 so far!

Results

Open Men

1 Soufiane Sahili

2 Yves Masnada

3 Reda El Abdi

4 Fettah Lamara

Masters

1 Fettah Lamara

2 Luc Telmat

3 Stephane Leveque

Grand Master

1 Frederic Houdier

Youth

1 Marc Alonso Cámara

2 Hajib El Abdi

3 Ajininar Marwan