There was a palpable sense of relief when the Summer came to an end in Taghazout. Don’t get me wrong it is still a lovely place to come and visit during July and August, but it is not the same place that we love.

For two months of the year thousands of Moroccans descend on the beaches of Taghazout, crammed with 12 people in a small apartment, for their Summer holidays. Think Newquay but without any rules! So for two months, we basically have a double whammy of small waves, and too many people. Then come the first week of September, everyone leaves and we get our quaint pretty fishing village back!

Following the President of Taghazout’s decision to get the village back to being a pretty blue and white fishing village (like it used to be), everyone has started not just painting their houses, but also cleaning up the streets. Don’t get me wrong there is a lot more that could be done, but if you compare the Taghazout that I saw last week with the Taghazout that I first saw 10 years ago, they are light years apart. Our first ever beach clean stretched up a few of the streets in the town and we collected 3 lorry loads of rubbish in one 4 hour session. Today, when we do a beach clean up, we get maybe 10 bags of rubbish, not even a 1/5th of a lorry!

We’ve just started sending out our vans with a couple of used flour bags to collect a bit of rubbish from each beach we surf at each day and gradually we’ll get on top of it around the coast as well. Part of the team helping doing this are our new gappies! We’ve got 12 of them in total, here for 12 weeks learning to surf and become qualified surf instructors. Wail and Maik are doing a fab job with them already (week two’s video analysis is already showing some great improvements!).

We’ll keep posting more images from the course and our efforts at tidying up the area, hopefully other surf schools will start seeing what we are doing and will feel motivated to follow suit and within a short period we’ll have done a huge job of tidying up the area. There is a bit of momentum now as the King basically just banned the use of plastic bags in supermarkets and small shops, so now could be the time!