PAPE'S STORY

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My name is Pape Diouf, I was born in Senegal and lived all my life in Yoff, Dakar. When you live by the sea in Senegal, you spend a lot of time at the beach. Surfing tourists as well as locals often came to surf on the spot in my neighborhood; since I was a child I was very intrigued and passionate about surfing. 

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Seeing all these surfers, I wanted to start this sport, but unfortunately in Senegal the procurement of equipment can be difficult. So I started surfing in Yoff in 2013 with friends, not having a board we surfed with what we found like broken boards, wooden boards, ... We then received a bodyboard to surf, so I learned the basics of surfing, that is to say the take-off on a bodyboard.

One day, a friend lent me a surfboard, a real one, and from that moment I had found my sport and my true passion.

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A surf school located on this beach proposed me to take their boards to go surfing, and at this moment, the concrete adventure in surfing started. In 2017, Malika Surf (the surf school lending me boards) hired me as a surf instructor. I am currently teaching classes with them. 

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As soon as the surfing bug caught me, board shaping was an obsession for me; I wanted to build my own board, so I had been looking at videos except that procuring equipment was not easy, so it was not possible. 

Then, the local shaper Walid from MCXN Boards offered me to help him with one of his orders and then proposed me to do a shaping training. So I am the first future native Senegalese shaper. 

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 Being still in training with Walid, Malika Surf proposed me to create my workshop in its spaces. So I started to repair boards in my workshop while continuing the training. The workshop is running almost every day; repairing plugs, noses, broken boards,... But also customs. 

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The feedback from my customers is very positive which motivates me to continue this craft and improve myself in order to create my first board one day.