The severe erosion that caused Tamarin to lose 100 meters of beach in the space of a few months could be considered a case study to identify shortcomings and enable the relevant agencies to develop a monitoring, coordination, and response system tailored to the demands and pace of the situation on the ground. Dominique Bellier
Percy Yip Tong has lived in Tamarin since 1968. This activist and tireless troublemaker lives in tune with the sea, watching the landscape’s constant transformations with fascination. Tamarin is renowned worldwide for the famous Santosha, a wave considered by surfers to be “the longest left” in the world! It forms on a reef break, a short distance from the coast, and can reach 100 to 200 meters in length.
The force of this ocean current—due to the absence of reefs—combined with the inflow from the Rempart and Tamarin rivers, which converge and divide the public beach in two, reshapes the bay with the changing seasons and weather. Every winter, the estuary is blocked by dunesformed by the tides , and the passage must be reopened so that freshwater can once again flow into the sea. In December 2025, this work was carried out too close to the shore, endangering facilities such as the kiosk , the barbecue area , and the parking lot . Local residents and fishermen raised their concerns with regional authorities, but to no avail.
Our interviewee moved heaven and earth in April, on the eve of the spring tides. “By the end of April, we’d reached a tipping point,” he explains. “The public beach had been eroded by 100 meters over the course of five months, to a depth of 1.50 meters. A disaster!” The roots of the century-old trees, which were supposed to hold back the sand in front of the human structures, had been largely exposed; one of them had fallen. Before the spring tides, Percy Yip Tong rented two excavators, purchased rocks, and placed them along the shore to limit the damage, because “thetide doesn’t wait for permits to operate…”
While he acted as a responsible citizen, he also experienced firsthand the complex workings of bureaucratic inertia. The positive outcomes of all this are that Tamarin is now included in the action plan for coastal protection, and the Beach Authority has the authority to commission a private contractor for emergency interventions. It remains to be seen what concrete actions will be taken to restore and protect the beach by next summer…
