Surfers head to coast to catch waves

Dubai: Surfers made their way down to Fujairah over the last two days in the hope of catching some waves and making the most of Cyclone Gonu but were faced with too much water to handle.

Click here to see the direction of Gonu (pdf)

Jason Offard, 37 from Australia said as a big wave surfer he was eager to get to the East Coast to surf and get the most out of the 12 foot waves but instead was faced with an uncontrollable mass of water.

"It was pretty full on and the waves were about 10 to 12 feet high but impossible to surf them because they were spilling out onto the beach rather than forming good waves," he said.

Surfers apparently congregate in Al Aqah at an area called Tim's reef which usually offers good surf.

"On Wednesday there was nowhere to paddle out to so I had to put it off but it should be quite good this weekend. A group of surfers are planning to go down. In Australia the waves are usually the same size but the cyclone makes it hard to ride the waves - they were out of control," said Offard.

He said the waves were coming right up to hotels along the coastline and pulled beach furniture in when it was not tied down.

Staff struggled to keep things from getting swept away and repeatedly jumped into crashing waves to retrieve chairs or signs.

"There were some tourists in the hotel who were just wondering what was going on but apart from that there weren't many people. On the roads we saw police telling people to go back and there was a fair amount of cars on the roads," said Offard.

"It wasn't as fierce as I thought it would be. The winds weren't as strong as I expected but I've never seen waves like that in Dubai," said Offard.