How to surf Namibia, according to Craig Anderson

1. You drive in from where all those car tracks are. There’s a lot of salt farms, and you get on the beach and drive until you get to the hook. It’s blown now, but it’s still one of the hardest waves to get to. And it’s fickle, I’ve been there three times and it was only breaking properly once.

2. In 2013, they banned cars driving up and down the beach. Crew were hiring people from town or getting a buddy to give rides back up to the top. It’s 1.3 miles from kick out to paddle out. Local guys would walk back up, paddle out, then a car would drop off six dudes who’d paddle into the inside.

3. Honestly, you walk up as far as you can be fucked. Even past the top of that lagoon up is where it starts getting good. You jump in and catch a couple down til you get in the zone where it’s perfectly lined up. Then you sit and wait. But the current through the whole wave is radical. There were 40 or 50 guys out, and you’d still see so many unridden waves. But it’s not perfect and easy.

4. That’s the zone you want to be taking off. You can have 10 guys sitting five metres on your inside, but the wave might not let them in. The best wave I got, I walked up as far as I could, jumped out, drifted down almost to where that second really good wave is here. I sat there for 20 minutes. 10 guys jumped off inside me and were sitting a few metres deeper. But not one of them got into it. I got a perfect wind chop down it. It’s such a hollow wave, and because of the wind and the way it hits the sand you can get a little entry in with the chop. You have to get lucky. If you position yourself anywhere in that zone you’re going to get a 15-20 second barrel.

5. People go out there for the day and park their cars, but if people need to go to the bathroom, it’s pretty comical because it’s so flat and you see people walking off back towards that salt lake behind the cars. Everyone knows what they’re doing, and they know that you know.

6. You see jackals running around, and seals jumping through the lineup… I saw a half-eaten seal on the beach there. It looked like a shark had just taken a huge chunk out of it.

7. It grows down the line and then runs into a really thick, Chopes-looking wave. Usually your legs are fucking sore, and you’re delirious because you’ve just been barrelled for two kilometres. Then it’ll start to closeout.

8. The wave even runs out of this frame. The foam down the bottom there is from churned up waves. You get those big patches of thick foam that you don’t really want to paddle through, because who know’s what’s in there. But this part of Africa is really barren and clean. If you look on Google Earth, you’ll see the bottom of this photo is just a finger of sand. Where it closes out, the water goes around and bends back into a big lagoon.