Paudies Photoblog

From A Day in 2007.

Man I kept some awful shots back then.

Was having a chat with a guy last weekend and we got talking to about the level of local surfing, how good it was to have all these guys around pushing themselves on these new slabs, as it would have a great knock on effect for all the younger guys. He basically just said that none of it counted as they weren’t Irish. I couldn’t believe it, he was just making one sweeping statement that dismissed a huge portion of the waves ridden in the area based on the completely random chance of where a person was born.

When I started to challenge him on it he went nuts. Started shouting about them “coming over taking our waves”, “fuck them, they weren’t born here they can fuck off”.

I just don’t get people like that, it’s straight up racism. To be honest I just felt sorry for the guy, the poor stupid fucker. Why does the place you were born have anything to do with anything? How is it relevant?

Like everyone else I get pissed off with travelling surfers who just show up, hog the waves and then leave again. But that argument has been made plenty of times before. Respect is what it’s all about.

But this guy wouldn’t even acknowledge a “foreign” surfer who has been living here for years and contributing to the local community/economy. Apparently it doesn’t count because he has a different accent. Fuck thinking about it now gets me fucking annoyed again. The guy I was talking to actually wanted us to not use the foreigners business and wanted me to “not take photos of any of them either”. Moron.

I do love Ireland, I love living here. It’s an amazingly beautiful place with great uncrowded surf, but the fact that I’m Irish means pretty much nothing to me. I’d be happy saying I was from any country. I don’t see how it matters at all.

I do hate the fact that it seems to be a little bit ingrained in all of us though, probably because of our surroundings growing up. I’ve definitely said “fucking English” before and it annoys me that I have this completely unjustified feeling in me. It’s some stupid left over feeling in our country that has nothing to do with the current generation of people who just happened to be born on the bit of land on the other side of the Irish Sea.

Anyway here’s a number of shots of surfers from all over the place.

Tom Doidge-Harrison (Not from Ireland)

Dan Skajarowski (Not from Ireland)

Tom Wimmer (Not from Ireland)

Glen Hall (Not from Ireland, but does he count because he has a passport?)

Liam Joyce (Not born here)

Silas (Not From here)

Tom Lowe (Get out of it)

Ok so welcome to the new blog, this is a lot more editable than the old one so stuff might look a bit strange for a while until I get the hang of things.

Please bear with me. (or is it bare with me?)

Here’s Hugopotamus throwing himself over the ledge for the enjoyment of all of you guys.

He actually hurt his back pretty bad on this one so get well soon Hugo.

It started off about a week ago, the charts were looking bloody amazing, the wind looked a bit sketchy but in Ireland the winds are always changing. As the week progressed it became clearer that Saturday was going to be too windy to bother checking anywhere so I decided to stay in Cork until Saturday night. Friday evening was still looking pretty solid for Sunday so we kept to the plan and headed up to Clare on Saturday evening.

It turns out it’d had actually been a pretty good day, on shore but fun. Pretty much everyone had entered a surf comp and had a pretty fun day, final came down to Fergal, Ollie, Damo and Kiwi transplant Liam Joyce. They only announced the results in the pub that night so everybody was out and in pretty good form, possibly because of the cheap (i.e. free) drinks promotion that bar was running. Ferg took the win in the end, the band started playing an fun was had, until the next morning.

I picked up a crazy hungover Damo at 7am. Turns out there was a price for all those free beers

We headed down the coast to the one high tide spot we were banking on, but the wind had gone just the wrong direction during the night and the spot looked awful, good old reliable Ireland eh? Turns out the swell was way smaller than expected as well.

We headed back to Lahinch to have some brekkie. Danny macs does a pretty sweet Surfers Breakfast (good old chips for breakfast, can’t beat it) if anyone’s ever looking for something in Lahinch I’d recommend this place. We headed up to Damo’s then to check out the new Relentless DVD . It’s fricken awesome by the way, really makes me want to give up everything here and just go travelling. We actually bumped into Fergal and Lowey later on in the day. It’s pretty weird to watch a surf vid and discuss the waves and the guys style and then meet them later.

Pumped the video we decided to go looking again and headed off to reliable Dougie. By this time Ollie had joined the us and was pretty keen to get wet as well. It was small but the boys suited up anyway, Joycey was there already punting over the heads of the unsuspecting beginners in the lineup.

Damo and Ollie followed him out and proceeded to tear the crap out of the knee high dribblers.

Eventually the boys got tired of doing the same turn 7,458 times the came back in and we decided to call it a day.

We started heading back up the coast to Lahinch but along the way saw some white water off one the points and went to investigate, the tide was still a little low but there were a few slabby barrels coming through. I really wanted to make the most of the sun so I got the boys back into their suits and started racing down across the reef.

The first wave we headed out to was a left but by the time we got into the lineup the tide had pushed over the shelf and it wasn’t really doing it anymore. There was a right just around the corner that was starting to work so myself and Ollie paddled over to check it out.

The bad thing about this was that we came in at the wave from the back. If you paddle out to a wave you usually get to watch a set or two break so you can see where the impact zone is. We just randomly paddle into a spot where we though the take off was, Ollie caught a small one and was paddling back out when a proper set came through and unloaded right in front of me. I tried to go under but the water was only about two foot deep so I got a ridiculous beating in which both fins got ripped off and I ended up sitting on some dry reef 100m down the line, not nice.

Damo had paddled over by now and managed to scrape into a few little barrels himself. Ollie was perfecting his late drop technique but always seemed to be hitting the lip just past me. But these things happen, I was just happy to be out there on a sunny glassy afternoon with two mates.

Not a bad end to the day.

This is an article I wrote for a mag about a year and a half ago, but it never got used.

Hope you like it.

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So when is a grom not a grom? When does that special transition occur? I guess Einstein got it right when he talked about everything being relative, it seems to depend either on how long you’ve been surfing or how old you are, and usually a combination of both. The question arose recently when a few of us Lahinch boys went on a small trip for Damien Conway’s 16^th birthday. Ah sweet sixteen are there any better times in your life? Well when you’re sixteen there definitely isn’t; just starting to develop your own style and self, old enough to fight back when the older guys starting hassling you and the right to pick on others. That seems to be about it, “congratulations you’re a proper surfer now, go pick on somebody smaller than you”.

We were heading to a fairly secret spot that only one of us had surfed before, so we were all pretty stoked to see how it would go. It was a pretty short-notice trip, which is the best way with surf trips as it makes it easier to make a call, I had to hang around home for some college work so joined the boys on the second day of the short weekend trip up the west coast of Ireland. I arrived to the usual tales of bravery, cowardliness, stoke and horror. Ollie O’Flaherty was proudly showing off half of one of his boards he had snapped that day and the rest of the boys were talking about the wide set that had sent them all scurrying to the horizon and still get washed half a mile down the coast (isn’t exaggeration part of surfing?) easily 8-10ft apparently. It was a little too windy so the wave, despite the size, wasn’t really doing it’s thing yet. Checking the web we saw that even though the swell was dropping so was the wind, so hopefully the break would be barreling it’s tits off to use the local expression.

The next morning we were disappointed to see that the swell had dropped by a good bit and Ollie started trying to convince us to check another spot a good few miles down the coast. This, however, would mean either taxis or a few trips in the car so we decided to check the local break first. The others weren’t too into it so myself and Damien headed out on our own only to be confronted by a number of farmers and a wild bull that was wandering around the rocks beside the jump off spot. We sat tight until the crazed animal decided grass was nicer to walk on than rocks. We phoned the boys and told them to start walking because we were jumping in straight away. It was 3-4 foot and looked fun. The guys eventually joined us and scored it OK. We hopped out after a while with the intention of heading down to this other wave but decided to sit tight and have lunch first, good move. During lunch the tide dropped and the swell started hitting the reef perfectly, being the token grom on the trip Damien was super keen to get back out and got sick of waiting so went out alone. His first wave was a solid 6 footer and it didn’t take long for Ollie and Kelleher to jump in after him. The place showed it’s real potential during this swell and will definitely go down on the list of return trips. After willingly paddling into the largest closeout of the day I reckon Damien has qualified from being a grom.

Mac getting shut down at the cliffs recently.

Apparently I’ve got some shots in the new Footprints Guide to UK and Ireland, still haven’t seen it though.

If anybody comes across one could you let me know how it looks?

Peter Conroy, warming up.

Late this morning, was editing the shots from Sunday.

Here’s a few of them thrown together.

More will come when I get down to picking and choosing some.

Hope you like.

My camera can only shoot off a burst of 6 shots in one go and then it needs a few seconds to get itself ready for the next sequence, but I have a tendency to have an itchy trigger finger.
I always hit the button too early so I get the setup but never the money shot.
Hey, at least it gives me something to work towards.

That’s Damo Conway on his way to a super keg, he got spat out about 50m past me.
Kinda wish I’d been on land with a video camera, ah well.

Myself and my mate Alex having a running joke about new camera gear.
We’re always trying to out do each other by claiming to have the newest gear.
His latest claim was the EOS 7D 900G retinal scanner.
Which would actually be pretty sweet.
I regularly get annoyed at not being able to capture everything I’m looking at just the way I see it.
I don’t always have my camera with me, the bus driver probably wouldn’t stop to let me take a photo and if he did it probably wouldn’t come out the way I saw it anyway.
So Retinal Implants are the way forward.

Here’s one from last winter of Ollie getting shutdown by a sweet looking number.