Sean O'Brien, Pro Windsurfer – seanobrien.com.au™

About 6 months ago I got some emails from some sailors in Mauritius asking about formula sails and fins. With +10,000 islands surrounding Australia, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to quickly throw Mauritius in to Google Maps and just check exactly where it was………. They had heard about me from my blog (www.CarbonSugar.com) where I’ve written a lot about training for Formula Windsurfing so it was good to see I am still generating hits on that site when I’ve had no time to write anything on there in the past year!

The dialogue continued for a few months and eventually the guys over there asked if I would be interested in coming to Mauritius to coach their elite Formula Windsurfing team. Coming up in August is the Indian Ocean Island Games; a mini-Olympics for the nearby islands of Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion and Madagascar involving many sports – with the two sailing disciplines this time being Lasers and Formula Windsurfing.

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Looking for some places to do some slalom training before the PWA Pro Tour event in South Korea next month, I discovered my good Dutch buddy Markus Bouman’s family has a house in Dahab, Egypt. 12 hours drive from Italy later I was sitting with Markus in Warsaw airport with 400kg of windsurfing gear and ready to go stalking camels.

We got super lucky with this trip, as the wind was perfect nearly every day of our 2-week stay. The house is away from the tourist areas where the surf-clubs and hotels are located, in the Bedouin town of Assalah, so we really got an opportunity to explore this amazing culture, away from the cliche tourist perception of Dahab. We rented a very old-school and falling-apart jeep, and despite the fact we spent more time learning how to Macguiver broken engine parts back together, we got amazing opportunities to drive north through the desert and windsurf in places no tourists have likely windsurfed; our own private reefs with only desert Bedouins for miles and miles. Mix in some snorkelling, camel rides, parties with the plethora of English tourists who frequent this town and plenty of late night Vodka escapades with our Polish friends and this was a perfect way to spend two weeks. Stay tuned shortly for the windsurfing pics and some movies that we shot during our stay…