Paudies Photoblog

Ollie “The Fla” O’Flaherty stalling hard for the pit man.

Get your Buzz on.

Does sentient technology freak anyone else out?

Took a chance spin up to Clare last Sunday. It was one of those swells where, instead of watching an initially epic swell gradually go to shit as it gets closer, I watched a plain old swell get better and better. 

It was only a short swell, normally the ones most likely to skunk you, but I really wanted to get in the water. Arranged to meet up with Ollie,  got up at half 6 (did you know it’s perfectly bright at half 6, as in as bright as it’s going to get, freaked me out as I thought I had slept in). A few months ago I finally bought a decent mp3 player, I know it’s taken a while but I wanted to make sure I got the right one. It’s 32GB yoke so when going on long drives I just tend to stick it on random.

This is the weird part, like I said 32GB so a lot of tracks/albums to choose from. For the first half hour I just got tracks from 5 or 6 albums only. It’s done this a few times though, so I’ve started thinking that it’s self aware and just gets into moods about what music it wants to play.

I eventually broke the pattern by forcing it play something from a different album. About 20 minutes later it 1979 from the pumpkins comes on, which is nice, but when it finishes it comes on again, this time from the greatest hits album, so I skipped the track and then it played 1974 by Ryan Adams (that’s Ryan not Brian). Now the goddam thing’s in a mood to play songs about years. Crazy

Which then got me thinking about the amount of songs/albums/bands that are named after years. I bet you 90% of them are named after the birth of the lead singer. Cocky bunch of arses, the world starts from the year I was born.

That said there are some crack tunes resulting, the two previously mentioned, all of 1977 by Ash, Feverdream’s Project of ’78 and The Flaws 1981.

Anyway back to what this place is mostly about.

I arrived to glorious sunshine and not a puff of wind. From Ollie’s house you could see a few small lines filing in by the rivermouth, enough to get us excited about chasing waves. 

I love reaching the top of the hill over-looking Doolin, first of all it’s a kick ass view in general and you also have a good 5 minutes to check the swell on the way down.It was actually looking pretty shabby, not as much swell as I’d hoped and not hitting it right either, but it was sunny and I didn’t want to waste that.

Lowv the way the spray from the turn blends in with the lip of the wave on this next one.

Even though I know how far the swim is to Doolin it always seems to take an age, and I also have a crazy fear of sharks so swimming on my back for 300m or so over a deep water channel always freaks me out. But it’s worth it for Crab, the water can be so clear out there, love the way Ollie’s fin is peaking through the water on this next one, also a pretty impressive turn considering it’s backhand. Pity about the Quiksilver sign and lack of any of Ollies actual sponsors.

Tom DH paddled out as well and as usual managed to sneak a few barrels amongst the messiness, I had a slight problem of angling the housing a little too high, pity that.

Kevin Doyle was around as well and managed a few cracks off the lip.

But as usual the best ones went by unridden on that inside bowl, with only myself to admire their beauty. Was seriously tempted to leave the housing on the island and try bodysurf a few.

Well, answer.

Mine has been mindsurfing for the past few days, in between doing some physicsy stuff. Final got that review over and done with so I’m back to reading and thinking about things again.

Here’s Ollie Fla after a sketchy enough time getting out of the water. Make for Higher Ground!

Same dodgy devil reef from a few posts ago. Ollie was caught in the middle of it and had to scramble when a clean up set started rearing it’s nasty head right behind him.