We had arrived at Shannon airport a few hours earlier, planning to surf all day and drink Guinness all night over the bank holiday weekend.
“It was three to four foot and offshore until about an hour ago” our new friend kindly informed us. “Now it’ll be howling onshore gales for days. You poor bastards” he added again, as if to emphasise the fact that the 5.30am start, the misery of the Stansted Express and the indignity of our Ryanair flight all seemed to be in vain. He even went to the trouble of showing us the weather charts confirming his grim forecast. Sure enough, we had landed in Ireland at the same time as the tail-end of Hurricane Bill, and he was due to stick around for the duration of our stay.
What made this considerably worse news for us was that about an hour and a half before this conversation we had driven straight from Shannon airport to the headland at Lahinch and seen the 3-4 foot swell pulsing into the bay, with long rideable waves spinning off the point/reef in an ocean that was, appropriately enough, the colour of Guinness.
In hindsight the sensible thing to have done at that point would have been to suit up as quickly as humanly possible and paddle out. However, being the kooks that we are, we decided that those waves “weren’t going anywhere”, so we would get some lunch, find somewhere to stay and have a surf in a couple of hours. Sure enough, in the time it took us to get some food and find somewhere to stay, the relative perfection turned into unrideable chop, thanks to the strongest onshore wind I have ever had the pleasure of leaning against. Stupid bastards.
We had come to jump on Ireland's surfing bandwagon. Never mind South West France, Ireland seems to be where it is happening. The Emerald Isle has suddenly become the destination of choice for surfers around the world, largely thanks to images of lunatics surfing giant waves at Aileen's and other big wave spots. I had always had images of Ireland's coast as isolated, wild and untamed. This was mainly thanks to endlessly watching Litmus, Andrew Kidnam's seminal 1996 film which features the permanenty stoned but insanely talented Joel Fitzgerald single-handedly taking on a series of nasty looking grey waves, most of which seem to have the sketchiest entry and exit points. (I wanted to embed a clip here but there are none on Youtube. However, Andrew Kidman does have a very mellow website - check it out.)
Despite Ireland's wild image, I somehow expected late summer sunshine and mellow surfs at manageable reef breaks and picturesque beaches. It wasn't to be. Hurricane Bill lashed the West Coast of Ireland for days, making all the spots we checked totally unsurfable. We searched far and wide for shelter, but despite the huge waves battering the exposed beaches, the sheltered spots were flat.
In fact, in 5 days, only one was vaguely surfable. Sunday morning saw a lov
ely clean 3 foot swell rolling into Strandhill beach, near Sligo. Only two guys were in and we soon realised why. The swell started dropping as soon as we paddled out. We had missed the best of it and within an hour it was virtually flat.Ireland is a beautiful country - we saw a lot of it through the car window as we drove around looking for shelter from the wind and the driving rain. As surf trips go, this one was a washout, and it is too easy to form an impression of a surf destination based on the conditions that prevailed when you were there. If it had been vaguely sunny and we'd had a bit more clean surf, I'd be singing Ireland's praises. As it is, I'm finding it hard to be positive about Ireland as a surf destination, but it will always hold a strange wild attraction to me thanks to Litmus and Joel Fitzgerald's stoned rantings...
