The weekend was full of competitions in São Domingos do Capim, a municipality in the northeast of Pará, 157 km from the capital Belém. The city was the first to hold an event of its kind and is known as the capital of surfing in Pororoca.
This type of dispute also occurs in two other municipalities in Maranhão and one in Amapá.
The event has been held for 13 years and, since 2019, has been recognized as Cultural and Intangible Heritage of Pará. In total, 119 athletes, aged 18 to 40, participated. The majority are residents of the city, but there are athletes from abroad with their eyes on the R$20,000 prize distributed to the best five.
The heats took place between Friday (17) and Sunday (19), including a night challenge, and were attended by more than 30 thousand people. Unlike most places, where the phenomenon of water meeting occurs between the river and the ocean, in São Domingos the dispute is in waves that form when two rivers meet.
“The waves at the Pororoca of São Domingos do Capim are not that high, they reach two meters, but they break paradigms because they are not the meeting of the sea and the river, but of the Capim and Guamá rivers. Especially because they are 180 kilometers from the sea. This has been proven by research, which shows that there is no salinity in the water, breaking this myth”, explains the president of the Brazilian Surfing Association at Pororoca, Noélio Sobrinho.
The rules of the dispute are similar to those of traditional surfing, with a specific tiebreaker criterion. “We have heat rules, such as verticality, as in traditional surfing, but the tie-breaking criterion is the wave time surfed, which, per heat, can be ten minutes or even half an hour”, reveals Sobrinho.
Among the participants was Gilvandro de Almeida Souza Junior, known as “Caçador de Poroca” and stand up paddle ultramarathon runner. He has participated in pororoca surfing since the beginning and goes on an expedition with a group of marathon runners that goes from Belém to São Domingos do Capim, along the river.
“This year the trip we took is to remap the area so that, next year, we can do the Pororoca route ultramarathon by stand up paddle, Hawaiian canoe, surfing and kayaking”, he reveals.
The best mark of the race was in the night heat, by athlete and physical education teacher Gilvan Batista Nascimento, 35, with a stay time of more than two minutes in the wave. He has already participated in four editions and, in one of them, he was runner-up.
“The biggest challenge in this competition, both for me and for the other athletes, was the number of surfers in the water, as there were more than a hundred. And this year there were also many boats, such as tails, kayaks and motorized vehicles. But it was worth it and everything went well and I ended up being champion”.
