The Skeleton Hunt

Surfing magazines and websites gorge on images and videos from Namibia’s ‘Skeleton Coast’.Where the desert meets the sea, long winding waves unload onto barren sands, drawingwaveriders from around the world. Thomas Traversa reflects on his journey to its shores.

- Thomas Traversa

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We always start by looking at the sea before venturing into it. It is its movement that defines it in our eyes, its undulations, the sound of its breathing, its colour, the rocks that it licks, the sand it swallows and spits out tirelessly. You just have to look at the surface of the sea to read the strength and direction of the wind, choose your sail and board before you jump into the water to do what makes you happy, navigate. The spectator leaves the apparent immobility of the earth’s ground to become an actor of a vast living spectacle. If the fire hypnotizes, the sea attracts, scares, provokes and fascinates.

Where the water meets the earth, its energy is concentrated in a last assault against the inert shore, a wave forms, and disappears. Followed by another one, then again a wave, so many ephemeral and unique expressions of the continuous agitation of the seas. There are places where the swell, when it is favourable, creates particular waves in the sense that we can ride them, tame them or challenge them; that is surfing. The shape and the regularity of the waves are what make these places become “spots”.

SKELETON BAY

Skeleton Bay in Namibia is currently one of the most incredible spots in the world for surfers and wave enthusiasts in general. You only need to look at a photo or a video of these perfect and endless lines to understand that there is an almost supernatural phenomenon happening on this stretch of coast. For more than two kilometres, waves break only a few metres away from the beach, one after the other, with a regularity and perfection that no healthy mind would be able to imagine. Literally, a dream wave.