When international superstar surfers took to the Petitcodiac River’s tidal bore last summer, thousands of stunned New Brunswickers watched them ride into town—and saw their once silt-choked river given a new lease on life.

In late July last year, Californian surfers Colin Whitbread and JJ Wessels climbed onto their boards to catch a growing tidal wave near Belliveau Village, NB, not far from where the mouth of the Petitcodiac River opens into the Bay of Fundy. Twenty-nine kilometres upriver, crowds started gathering along the banks of the Petitcodiac in Moncton, waiting for the duo to ride the big wave into town. No one had ever ridden a tidal bore for such a long distance in North America.

Whitbread, 34, and Wessels, 30, surfed the bore for two and a half hours, and were joined by Costa Rican-turned-Monctonian surfer Melvin Perez, 36, in the last kilometre. When all three reached the end of their ride at the causeway, which connects Moncton with neighbouring Riverview, they were greeted on shore by spectators cheering, “Surfers, surfers, surfers!”

The men made their way back onto the wave the next day, and the day after that. “It was ridiculous,” says Fred Hamilton, a 35-year-old surfer based out of Sooke, BC, who co-organized the event with writer and photographer Yassine Ouhilal. Both Hamilton and Ouhilal accompanied the Californians the entire length of the river on jetskis, with Ouhilal taking pictures.

Hamilton also surfed the river multiple times in the days before and after the big event. “For over two hours we were surfing this small, but fun wave and doing that everyday for a week.”

“You’re riding a tidal wave, even if it’s a small tidal wave,” says Whitbread. “It’s got a force, a push that’s not normal.” The remarkable thing, though, wasn’t just that professional surfers rode the Petitcodiac’s tidal bore for close to 30 kilometres, but that the surfers drew thousands of people back to a river that had been choked and ignored for decades. Covered in mud, Whitbread, Wessels, Perez and the others showed Monctonians that their river is something to be prized—it’s part of their identity.

“The older people who had used the river back when they were children were coming up to us after this thing had started to become a big deal,” says Whitbread, “and they were so happy that we had brought an awareness back to the river.”

Catherine Dallaire grew up in Moncton and is now a general manager for the city. “Anybody out in that river when the tide is low, for those of us who don’t remember the river any other way, that usually meant that you call the fire department for a rescue,” she says. “In my lifetime I don’t ever remember Monctonians paying such close attention to bore times.”

Water from the Petitcodiac is continuously flowing out into the Bay of Fundy, but when the Fundy tide—the highest in the world—turns, it creates a counterflow, pushing a metre- to two-metre-high wave called the tidal bore up the river twice daily, raising the river more than seven metres.

Before the causeway was built in the 1960s, people would swim and fish in the Petitcodiac. The tidal bore was over two metres high. You could hear it as it roared up the river.

But in 1968, the federal and provincial governments constructed the causeway—a road on top of a wall built in the river—in an attempt to control floodwaters. According to Pierre Landry, chair of the environmental group, the Petitcodiac Riverkeepers, the causeway ended up destroying the river by limiting the free flow of water. And the two-metre tidal bore became a ripple.

“For the most part of the last forty years, we’ve been choking this river,” says Landry, explaining that the sedimentation in the Petitcodiac, which contributed to its ‘Chocolate River’ nickname, has been slowly building up over the decades.

Concerned about the state of the river, the Riverkeepers formed in 1999, and right away began lobbying to open the causeway gates. Ten years later, the group successfully argued that the governments that built the structure were in violation of the federal Fisheries Act because the gates restricted the movement of fish. In 2010 the gates opened, and slowly the tidal bore grew, catching the attention of surfers looking for a challenge.

Fred Hamilton is a self-described surf-explorer, who started surfing the East Coast when he moved to Cape Breton to attend the Canadian Coast Guard College from 2000 to 2004. He missed surfing so much while he was in school that he started exploring every little rocky nook and cranny he could find, and caught waves “all over the island, literally.”

When Hamilton—now a master mariner who works on ships all around the world, installing and repairing fibre optic cables—found himself back in Nova Scotia in 2013, he started surfing in Atlantic Canada again, but grew tired of the typical Nova Scotia waves. Looking for a new challenge, he began thinking about surfing the tidal bore, something that had first occurred to him when he had moved to the East Coast to attend college.

Hamilton and Ouhilal began researching the Petitcodiac in June 2013. They found access points to the river and surfed part of it, near Lower Coverdale, NB, in early July— just a couple of weeks before Colin Whitbread and JJ Wessels’ marathon surf.

“We weren’t super successful at riding it for a long time,” Hamilton says, explaining that because of the smaller bore their surfboard fins dragged along the silty bottom. So they started making plans to surf the entire Petitcodiac during a “super bore”— when the gravitational pull of the moon increases the size of the wave—later in July.

Surfing the whole thing would require money for jetskis, so riders could help the surfers get back on the wave when they fell. To offset some of the costs, the duo decided to bring in pro-surfers Whitbread and Wessels, and Ouhilal would write about it for The Surfer’s Journal, a California-based magazine.

Melvin Perez joined the party at the last-minute. Until June 2012, Perez, who surfed the last leg of the record-breaking run on July 25, was living the surfer’s dream in his native Costa Rica, spending endless hours catching waves in the tropical sun. “For me surfing is like, wow! Like hockey for Canadians,” he says. “I was surfing there almost everyday.”

And then he moved to Moncton, trading his Costa Rican surfing life for his wife’s hometown.

Perez thought about surfing the bore soon after he arrived, but his friends and family told him the river was too dirty and too dangerous.

The next summer, in 2013, he was at work at the downtown hotel, Château Moncton, when he saw people checking in with surfboards. That was when he found out about Hamilton, Ouhilal, Whitbread and Wessels’ plan. He arranged to join them as the wave arrived in the city, and he’s surfed the bore more than 50 times since.

“It’s a special thing,” he says. It’s also the only tidal bore in North America that’s really accessible.

A wave on the ocean releases its energy as it hits the shore, but the bore, which comes just once every 12 hours, “just kept going and going and going,” says Whitbread.

“The wave was always, constantly changing,” he says. It would grow and shrink, and push left and then right. “It’s like steam rolling, its breaking up the cliff and if you miss it then you don’t get another chance until tomorrow.”

Surfers riding the bore need strong leg muscles, and lots of experience. Because of the mud, the tide and the constant push, it’s not a feat for amateurs. (“If you get stuck,” says Perez, “the current doesn’t stop raising the level of the water.” The risk of drowning is real.)

But for the right surfer, on the right day, there aren’t many waves more exciting. “It’s the challenge that makes you feel like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to miss it, I don’t want to miss it.’ All that adrenaline is running around your body,” says Perez. “If you fall, that’s it. You have to wait until the next day.”

Hamilton says there’s little that the city or the province needs to do to promote the bore because word is already out and surfers from all over are on their way. He and Whitbread are coming back.

The surfers demystified the Petitcodiac for a younger generation that doesn’t remember it prior to the causeway. The attention the surfers brought to Moncton was astounding, says Landry. “It was like winning the lottery. We couldn’t have planned it better.

“If there is such thing as a God,” says Pierre Landry, “he has a surfboard in his garage.”

Last July’s record-breaking surf became a phenomenon that attracted coverage from regional and national media, such as the Telegraph-Journal and the National Post, and international media such as ABC’s Nightline.

“Absolutely, absolutely, it caught the entire community by surprise,” said Catherine Dallaire.

“We never thought it would have the impact that it’s having,” says Hamilton, who’s writing a report for the city, along with Ouhilal, outlining safety hazards and suggestions on what the city could do as the popularity of the river increases with surfers.

The sewage issue is one thing he thinks the city needs to act on.

Sewage gets only primary treatment now, but it’s still not enough to meet federal guidelines. Construction of a secondary treatment plant should be underway next year and is expected to be in operation by 2018. In order to surf the river the team organized for the sewage outpour to be stopped for the duration of their rides.

One time, Whitbread says, the city didn’t turn it off, and it was obvious.

“That just looks bad on the Greater Moncton area,” says Hamilton. The international attention is putting a limelight on the river, and now that more people are making their way into its waters, there’s more pressure on the governments to clean it up.

Currently, the city’s downtown, although within a short walk from the winding, muddy Petitcodiac River, is separated from it by paved parking lots and fast-moving cars on Assomption Boulevard. Now there is a renewed drive for the city to redesign part of downtown, and Downing Street, across from city hall, is set to become pedestrian-centric and a critical link between downtown and the river.

Costa Rican transplant Perez, says the city is forever changed. “Believe it or not, Moncton is now a surf town.”