Hamad Alhashmi learnt to surf a hemisphere away, in Melbourne, where he’d moved to study electrical engineering. It wasn’t until after graduation, when he came home to Dubai, he found something almost nobody outside the country expects: the UAE has waves. Not world-class ones. But real, ridable, wind swell that shows up roughly 100 to 150 days a year on the Arabian Gulf side, concentrated through winter.
The pattern is its own kind of local knowledge: the first day of a swell brings onshore slop, and it’s only as the wind drops on the tail end that the waves clean up. January and February bring the biggest swells of the year, when a storm comes out of Oman, and also, by Hamad’s own admission, the trickiest. “It gets messy when the waves get big,” he said. “But I still go out. It feels good.”
Summer is the opposite. The Gulf goes flat, and the UAE’s surfers point their cars toward Oman instead – seven hours away, but slightly more consistent, with occasional storm swell wrapping onto the UAE’s east coast near the Strait of Hormuz. It’s a smaller, more finicky window, but on its day, he says, it’s the best surf the country has access to.
The UAE surf community is partly a product of geography, timing and a handful of people who built around the limitations. Dubai had a coastline, but little of the infrastructure that usually grows around a surf scene. Surf House Dubai, founded around 20 years ago by a Brazilian and a South African, became one of the early gathering points, arriving long before the country’s wave pools. “I’m very thankful for these guys,” said Hamad. “That’s how the surf culture grew up in the UAE.”
Two decades on, Surf House remains one of the places surfers turn to for equipment and repairs. There are no local shapers. Boards are imported and sold by the business, or brought in by travelling surfers and friends. For years the sport ran on nothing more than on this. That changed only at the start of this year, when surfing was folded into the Dubai Rowing and Sailing Federation, giving the country’s surfers an actual governing body for the first time. It’s a new board and a new mandate. Hamad hopes its the beginning of the kind of structural support that turns a hobby into a pipeline.
Right now, Dubai has exactly two places to surf. Construction on the Palm Islands and the artificial World Islands has choked off much of the coast’s natural swell corridors, leaving one public beach – the crowded one, next to the Burj Al Arab – and one private break controlled by a hotel. On a good day, there could be more than 50 people in the surf, split across whatever peaks the beach throws up. “It’s not professional friendly,” Hamad admits. Beginners outnumber everyone else. About an hour’s drive away, in Umm Al Quwain, there’s also a third option: a kitesurfing center known locally as Kite Beach, where surfers share the water with kiters rather than competing for space with other surfers.
The country currently also has two wavepools: Surf Abu Dhabi, the newer and more expensive of the pair, and an older pool called Wadi Adventure in Al Ain, about an hour and a half’s drive from Dubai, which opened in 2011 as the region’s first wave pool. Hamad said a large part of the local surf community isn’t willing to spend what Surf Abu Dhabi charges. Over the summer, Surf Abu Dhabi introduces a package deal letting surfers ride more waves for less money – by his estimate, around half what he’d normally pay for the same time in the water.
Five years ago, he was one of a handful of Emirati locals surfing at all. Today he counts around 30 who are his age or younger, with roughly 10 more having picked up a board in just the last two years. “This is very exciting,” he said. “I think the federation should focus on these people and push them to improve.”
Hamad came close to qualifying for this year’s Asian Games through the Asian Surfing Championship. “But things are getting challenging in the region right now” – a reference to wider regional tension that he says is slowing plans well beyond sport. “Not just sports. Everything. Economy, everything.”
His own template for what’s possible traces back to another Emirati surfer, one of the country’s first to compete internationally, who won a WSL wipeout-of-the-year award for a fall on a genuinely big wave. “Seeing that really pushed me,” he said. “I was scared to go into such conditions. He was the main inspiration for me to just push hard.” He’s since chased that push to Indonesia, the Maldives, Portugal, and most recently Saudi Arabia – a level of travel he calls, flatly, “costly,” and one he hopes the new federation will eventually help underwrite. He’s aiming for next year’s ISA World Championship, which will double as an Olympic qualifier.
The stubbornest obstacle, though, isn’t the waves, the equipment, or even the funding. It’s winter itself – the same season that produces the country’s best surf is also the season most bound up in Emirati tradition, the desert camping and gathering that trace back to how the country was founded. Convincing people to trade that for the ocean has been an uphill fight even for someone with an instructor’s license. “I tried, and I couldn’t attract many people to come learn surfing,” he said. “I think this is the role of the federation now.”
