What a Bore… by Heidi Fuller-Love

It's September and despite the melancholy of rusted autumn leaves the sleepy town of Saint Pardon in the French department of Dordogne is throbbing like unexploded dynamite. Outside the town's only café (already breathing later-evening odours of foie gras on toast and mussels braised with garlic) the serious kayakers are limbering up. Next to them the body-board brigade play it cool and swap 'wave-that-got away' yarns whilst videos fuse and a gaggle of kids are so overawed they can only nudge and stare.

One thing has brought these people together, one thing unites them with a common passion: they are waiting to experience one of France’s most stunning natural phenomena: the mascaret.

Said to derive it’s name from the village of Saint-Macaire on the Garonne river where spectators have gathered since mediaeval times to watch the spectacle, if you look up mascaret in an English/French dico you’ll find ‘a high wave which remounts a river at rising tide’. Also dubbed ‘pororoca’, ‘ aegir’ or ‘tidal bore’ depending on your time zone, this spectacular white-capped event - which takes place on sixty rivers round the world including the Amazon, the Ganges and the Mekong - is a positive surge of tidal origin and occurs when tidal flow turns to rising on rivers which narrow to a funnel.

In France the first mascaret to attract crowds was the one which swept along the Seine. From the 19th century on the seven meter wave brought Parisians fluttering down from the Capital dressed in their best white pants and bustled skirts and since they generally stood too close to the rivers edge to watch the phenomenon their annual soaking was the source of much mirth to better-informed locals.

Said to possess special healing powers the bore ,which traveled at speeds of up to ten kilometers an hour, soon earned itself a far more sinister reputation. The Seine’s mascaret capsized some 217 vessels and took double that in lives until the river was finally dredged in the 1950’s and the roaring wave was finally reduced to a whimpering ripple.

Mascaret surfing began in France in the late 1970’s when pioneering kayakers first paddled the phenomenon along the Garonne. The thrill quickly attracted hordes of lighter craft and when the wave got too crowded surfers ‘in the know’ moved northwards to the picturesque port of St Pardon in Dordogne.

Set just a dozen miles from the wine-lovers region of Bordeaux and hidden amongst the vineyards of France’s best-known vintages, the river’s two-mile straight with numerous take-off areas, makes the spot ideal for kayakers vying to ride the wave.

’Though the Bore occurs twice a day there are only half a dozen times a year when the wave is worth riding,” says local expert Philippe Boiron . Best conditions coincide with the largest tide coefficients. “Coefficients of over 100 produce the best waves, “ he says Other factors to look for are a prolonged dry period, wind blowing up river and low atmospheric pressure. The wave is at its biggest in early autumn when freshwater levels are low, which means less surge resistance.

If the bore is hardly more than a few choppy waves on days with a low coefficient, when the coefficient is important the sea’s water thunders up the narrowing channel like a raging bull, pushing the river’s water ahead of it and getting bigger and quicker as the river narrows. A mascaret is at it’s most spectacular when the river’s calm and the torrent crowned with foam can be seen rising out of the bend nearly a mile away.

At St Pardon the mascaret is announced by a cats-paw tremor rippling the river’s silvered pelt like skin on the top of milk. Rising like a sleeve rolled back along the river’s current the wave gradually covers with rabid foam and if it’s possible to follow alongside on foot at first, it soon becomes impossible to keep pace. By the time the wave reaches St Pardon’s pretty port the ripple is a churning maelstrom throwing boulders out like giant marbles at spectators who jump back from the river bank in terror. As one man put it : “ It’s like the Lord of the Rings when the Dark Rider’s horses are drowned! “

Steve is a body boarder who’s ridden the bore at St Pardon for the past five years “ Everyone tries to catch the first wave but the second or third are often break higher “he says. “We say ‘the wave’ but really it’s like a very heavy swell”, he adds.

A good wave advances at a speed of 5 or 10 kmph ,sometimes reaching 15 as the river narrows. Shallows slow it down and the constantly changing river bed makes the waves flatten, swell or change direction so skillful handling of body board or kayak is vital in such turbulent waters. The art of riding the bore is to pick a wave and stay on for as long as possible and St Pardon’s current record holder traveled 3 ½ miles in 22 minutes. “It’s like reading a runaway train only the tracks are full of water,” says Steve. Surprisingly there have been very few accidents. “ Anyone can come and have a go, but I’d advise them to get a good insurance,” Steve jokes.