Qulansiyah 61.4

#3045 of 5756 surf spots in the world · 🇾🇪 Yemen · Hadramawt · near Hadiboh

Wind is the enemy here, peaks in October, boardshorts water.

Best time to surf Qulansiyah

The best time to surf Qulansiyah is May, October. It rarely works. In October the water sits around 27°C, so pack boardshorts, and the typical wave is 0.6 m. The nearest airport is ADE (919 km) and the nearest town is Hadiboh (57 km).

What is under Qulansiyah

Eight kilometres out along its swell window the sea floor drops to 84 m, shoaling steadily over the last kilometres. Alongside the bank the survey finds a channel, 120 m against 84 m, deep enough to bend swell onto one peak instead of spreading it along the beach.

Measured, not estimated: NOAA ETOPO 2022 global relief at 15 arc-seconds, about 460 m per cell, sampled along this spot’s own swell window. At that scale the survey sees passes and channels; it cannot see a reef ledge, so nothing here is said about how the wave breaks.

Why 61.4

Seven parts, each normalised 0 to 1 and multiplied by its weight; the sum is scaled so the best spot in the world scores 100. Wave quality and what the spot does on its best days carry more than half of it, which is what separates this from a ranking of where the water is warm.

The detail

Faces 340° with 64% open water around it. Friendly morning wind 50% of days. Mean peak period 8.7 s. Days over 3 m: 6%. On its best tenth of days it reaches 2.8 m, with a peak period of 10 s. Mellow days (0.4 to 1.2 m): 51%. Months that work: 9 of 12. Coordinates 12.712, 53.505 (OpenStreetMap).

What it costs to be here

Remote spot, so the local estimate is 20% below the country average. Estimate: World Bank PPP price level for Yemen (2013, United States = 1.00) applied to a fixed surfer basket, then adjusted for how remote the spot is. Your own number moves with the season and how you live.