Surf the wild seas of Ireland
As the temperature drops and the waves grow, surfing comes to the wild west - of Ireland. Braving the cold, Leonard Doyle dons a wetsuit to join the thousands of board dudes in Lahinch
Published: 26 November 2005 by Independent.co.uk
First came the detonation as a thousand-tonne Atlantic wave crashed over the sea wall at Lahinch, the spray topping the walls of our ancient seaside lodge. Then followed the unnerving sound of rocks rolling deep beneath the flagstone floor. This was followed in turn by the hiss and shuffle of waves draining back out to sea again.
By now, everyone was awake. A deep mid-Atlantic depression had worked the ocean into a violent state a thousand miles away. The spectacular after-effects were crashing ashore outside the window.
I was back in County Clare to take a look at the huge surf kicked up every autumn by early winter storms and watch some of the expert surfers take their long and short boards out on the waves. As the Atlantic rollers pounded against the sea wall, the boom of every wave resounded deep inside the lodge's four-foot thick walls. It was a somehow reassuring sound after an absence of several years.
The lodge has been in our family for more than 150 years. Perched on the edge of Europe, it has witnessed some of the most tumultuous times in Irish history - the 1840s famine, when it sheltered the destitute, and the war of Independence, when a raiding party of the Black and Tans militia avenged a Republican ambush. The Tans torched much of Lahinch, sending the locals, my grandmother included, scrambling across the golf links, where they spent a night hiding among the dunes.
The morning reveille meant, that after an interminable wait, surf was up in Lahinch. A big sea had been promised for days by local veteran surfers Tom Buckley and Alan Coyne, who monitor data from a host of US satellite and ocean buoys in order to predict the arrival of storm swells from deep in the Atlantic.
"This will be a big one," Tom predicted from the vantage-point of his surf shop on the promenade, "and with these offshore winds we should be in for some good surfing."
It didn't take long for word to get out. Prompted by the modern-day bush telegraph of bloggers, e-mail, text message and chatter on the web, surfers from as far away as London, Wales and the east coast of Ireland were soon pouring into this once-quiet golfers' village. Ryanair's new Shannon hub means that surfing the big waves of the West of Ireland is now as affordable as Cornwall.
The Stormrider Guide - a surfer's bible - proclaims that : "Ireland is blessed with some of the cleanest, most alive oceans in Europe." Autumn and early winter is when the season comes into its own as huge weather systems pass over the region. The Lahinch area, at the epicentre of the west coast is one of the best starting points for anyone hoping to watch the experts surf, or take to the waves themselves, as I did on a trusty Bic longboard.
Stormrider calls Lahinch the "closest thing to a surf town in Ireland". The venerable members of Lahinch Golf Club might take issue with this description. As they see it, Lahinch is a golfers' village, and always will be. They have been calling their club "the St Andrews of Ireland" ever since a couple of officers of the notorious Black Watch Regiment took a break from chasing down Irish "Whiteboy" rebels to play a round of golf in the dunes.
A few homesick Scots officers, together with some Irish enthusiasts, soon laid out a links course. On Good Friday, 15 April 1892, the first game of golf was played here between Lieutenant McFarlane and William E McDonnell, a "merchant prince" from Limerick. It is not recorded who won the game, but village tongues were soon wagging when meat was served at the after-match celebration.
"Glory be to God," remarked a forerunner to Father Ted, "and I hear they are going to eat meat on this blessed day. What's the world coming to at all, at all?"
Later "Old" Tom Morris came over from St Andrews to lay out a proper course. In the best tradition of boosterism, he enthused: "I consider the links as fine a natural course as it has ever been my good fortune to play over."
By happy coincidence the links, the ocean and the main street meet almost in the centre of the village. A huge expanse of sea dominates the view from any angle. Hop over a stile behind Frawley's pub - one of the smallest and friendliest in Ireland - and you are already on the links.
But golf on this championship course is strictly for the committed. The club charges a whopping €145 a round for green fees and, unsurprisingly, most visitors are American. This explains the "No Mulligans!" sign on the first tee. No, they are not discriminating against members of the Mulligan clan, but discouraging American golfers from following Bill Clinton's habit of taking a second free shot (and not counting it on the score), after hideously muffing his first.
Today, the surfers and the golfers amicably co-exist. Some participate in both sports, but surfing has the zeitgeist of fashion behind it. It is also free, and open to all.
As a young lad, I spent many summers hacking around the golf course. Ranked in the top 50 in the world, it had none of the stuffiness associated with suburban golf clubs. Then and now, the weather report was provided by two old goats tethered together. Knowing the forecast was easy. When they were around the clubhouse - where they always seemed to be - it was going to rain. If spotted out on the course, then we were in for a "heatwave". Golf on the championship course is out of bounds for most visitors - though there is a good second course - but the surfing is not.
It was turning into a perfect Lahinch day. Temperatures were mild and by mid-morning the bay was a crescent of graceful, even rollers. The wind had shifted offshore, bringing about a complete change in the shape and contour of the waves as they rumbled in from the deep. All week, the wind from the sea had been smashing down the peaks making them difficult to surf. Now it was blowing out from the land, brushing the surface of the ocean smooth and causing the waves to come ashore in text-book rollers.
As the hours passed, more than 100 surfers could be seen flitting across the skyline. The best among them caught wave after wave, dancing down the face of six-footers and finally crashing out in the breakers.
Dedicated surfers spend a lot of time driving around in search of the perfect "break". Ireland's green waters and shoreline of rocky headlands and flat reefs facing directly into the swell make for some of the best surfing conditions in Europe. But when the wind or tide are not ideal in one location, there is always the promise of a perfect break a few miles around the headland.
Some of the breaks near Lahinch can be truly terrifying. At Crab Island, near the Cliffs of Moher, a wave will suddenly jack up out of the ocean to develop huge and frightening tubes. Some of the expert surfers, such as Ollie O'Flaherty, a schoolboy sensation, and the Irish senior champion and surf-instructor John McCarthy can handle them with ease. But poorly advised visitors are known to retire bloodied and bruised - often with broken bones and surfboards.
McCarthy has just discovered a new wave, which he told me is probably the most frightening in the world. "We jet ski out from about five miles away and then catch this wave right under a thousand foot cliff. I'm not sure what's most frightening - the wall of water or the approaching cliff."
The first recorded description of surfing comes from Captain James Cook's travels to Hawaii in the 1770s. Some even believe that Cook was mistaken for a Polynesian surf god when he came ashore during a religious festival. He failed to live up to his billing and a Hawaiian chief killed him when he demanded the return of a stolen boat.
It took until 1907, however, for surfing to get a true literary champion when the writer Jack London witnessed it for the first time on Waikiki beach. London's lyrical evocation of this Polynesian* * pastime - "walking on water", as he called it - was published as a chapter in his book The Return of the Snark, quickly spreading word across America of this new sport.
His heady depiction of the surfer as a winged Mercury followed an epic day spent on Waikiki with an Irish-Hawaiian surfer named George Freeth. The son of an Irish sailor and Hawaiian mother, Freeth was an extraordinary athlete. For his first surf lesson, he took London onto the south side of the island on a big day. London almost succeeded in standing up on his first lesson.
"I will never forget the first big wave I caught out there in the deep water. I saw it coming, turned my back on it and paddled for dear life... I heard the crest of the wave hissing and churning, then my board was lifted and flung forward. I scarcely knew what happened the first half minute. Though I kept my eyes open , I could not see anything for I was buried in the rushing white wave of the crest. But I did not mind; I was chiefly conscious of ecstatic bliss at having caught the wave."
That evocation of surfing led directly to Freeth being invited to California by a railway company and real-estate developer to help drum up tourism to temp migrants from "back East".
Billed as "the man who could walk on water", he single-handedly introduced surf-riding to southern California - from where it spread around the world. Sadly, London would die within a few years. Freeth died early too, succumbing at the age of 35 to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 while living in California.
It would take many years - and the advent of cosy 4mm wetsuits - for surfing to take off in Ireland. Thanks to the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream, it is now a year-round phenomenon - even if few have heard of the Irish-Hawaiian who turned surfing into a global phenomenon. In fact, it wasn't until the arrival of a group of Oxford students in the late 1960s that surfing came to Lahinch.
Today, the village, which for decades scraped a living from a short summer-holiday season, has become a year-round destination for dedicated surfers. The hard core among them have won national titles and will go out in all weathers, heading fearlessly to where the waves break on great underwater reefs. Almost out of sight from the shore, they accomplish feats of endurance and skill that seem to me unimaginable.
The storm out in the Atlantic had worked its magic. The waves were pumping and surfers were blowing in from all over. Lahinch was buzzing. Four-wheel-drives were pulling into town with four and five surfboards on the roof. The local hostelries were doing a roaring trade; Mrs O' Brien's Kitchen offering a "surfer's breakfast" at a bargain €7.95 a plate. Antoin O'Looney, an old boyhood friend and veteran Lahinch surfer, was watching the action with glee. His claim to fame is that he was first to paddle the English Channel on a surfboard. The board still beckons from the rafters of his father's pub. Today Antoin owns and runs Moy House, one of Ireland's finest country house hotels. He has spent the last couple of years restoring the early 18th-century Moy estate, transforming it into an exquisite nine-bedroom hotel looking directly out into the bay. But with guests waiting he had to ignore the call of the waves.
In Ireland, there is generally only one degree of separation: I am reminded that Antoin's seafront pub, now called O'Looney's (for surf, seafood and stout), was sold for a song by my grandmother in the 1940s. Now it is the gathering place for surfers in the village.
It's not always harmonious, of course, and occasionally locals and surfers come to blows. When a handful of surfers blocked access to a farmer's property with their cars, he got so upset that he swung his shovel at the head of one of the offending visitors. Fortunately, the shovel snapped and the surfer survived. The police were called while the surfers were out on the waves and parking tickets were issued for blocking access.
Wildly exaggerated accounts circulated of the farmer's battle with the surfers. But one detail remained consistent. While every Irish car was issued with a parking ticket - to the indignation of the locals - it emerged that the police had not issued a single ticket to the UK visitors. Welcome to County Clare, they seemed to be saying.
TRAVELLER'S GUIDE
GETTING THERE
Shannon is served by Ryanair (0906 270 5656; www.ryanair.com) from Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Stansted, Luton, Gatwick and East Midlands; easyJet (0905 821 0905; www.easyJet.com) flies from Gatwick and Aer Lingus (0845 084 4444; www.aerlingus.com) from Heathrow.
STAYING THERE
Moy House, Lahinch (00 353 65 708 2800; www.moyhouse.com). B&B from €200 (£143).
EATING & DRINKING THERE
Mrs O'Brien's Kitchen, Main Street, Lahinch (00 353 65 708 1020).
O'Looney's Pub (00 353 65 708 1414).
VISITING THERE
Lahinch Golf Club (00 353 65 708 1003; www.lahinchgolf.com).
FURTHER INFORMATION
The Stormrider Guide: Europe (Low Pressure Publishing, £24.95).
Lahinch Surf School, Ballyfaudeen, Lahinch (00 353 65 708 2061; www.lahinchsurfschool.com).
Irish Surfing Association (00 353 96 494 28; www.isasurf.ie).
County Clare Tourism (0800 783 8359; www.county-clare.com).
