Hyah!
Mountains Gandalf!
Views from my eyes on a trip around the world.
Ireland is my world
Who needs somewhere else.
It’s hard to not feel like I was being rewarded after my super depressing post a while back.
But it’s all chance.
It happened to be sunny.
Lets give it four hours, it’ll probably be icey.
Shannon to Sligo, doable, need to reach Shannon first.
I do and stay up too late chatting about LUE.
0500 ding ding, up you get sunshine.
Weetabix: check Sultanas: check Soya milk: check.
Ice was forecast, but there is only a light dusting, no need for water, just get in and go.
The county councils seem to have learned from their mistakes as there is a new an abundance of grit dirtying my recently washed car. But at least I can drive at the limit now.
I fly along the motorway trusting that other cars will have their fog lights on. I always regret my driving afterwards, but in the moment getting to the surf supersedes anything else. It is a stupid choice to drive this fast.
My back and neck begin to ache and I’m getting a headache. I realise I’m sitting hunched right up over the steering wheel. The combination of concentrating on the small distance my lights give and the oppressive fog pushing down on top of me is wearing me out. I feel claustrophobic, as if the fog is physically pushing me down into crouch.
There is no let up. I get to Tuam and decide I can take a break. Half an hour power nap will relax me a bit and give the fog time to clear a bit.
I hit the road again with a bit more brightness. I don’t know if this is better or worse. No there’s a few idiots who think because it’s past 7am they don’t need the lights. One car happily flashes me back when I try to get his attention. But as I continue the fog starts to lift a bit.
I begin to get horrible flashbacks to my last adventure in fog.
I arrive in Enniscrone too early despite my mid-trip nap. It’s still foggy.
Freezing Foggy.
I meet up with Cain, we chill for a while talking about what to do. The wave I came up to shoot won’t be working for another few hours so we cruise the coast looking for something to keep us occupied.
We find a little bay with a few waves coming through. There’s a bit of slab around the corner but tide is already too high for it, although it’s hard to resist the barrels I can just glimpse over a ridge of grass.
No point jumping in the water, much more likely to get shots from land despite the distance.
I start wandering looking for interesting angles. Land shooting is bloody boring but you make up by being able to move around to get different angles and actually compose shots properly.
And you have more options of things to shoot during the lulls.
My battery is almost dead now. I regret not arranging some signal with Cain before hand. He stays in picking off the best ones, always trying something interesting.
Eventually he comes in and we head back to the house to refuel ourselves and our electronics.
By the time we get all our stuff together it’s time to head over to the main event.
We arrive to a seething cauldron of white water.
Yeah Cain I think I’ll just shoot land here as well.
Ferg, Shane and Dyl are there as well and don’t waste time suiting and booting and entering the fray.
Dodging bombs is the order of the day, Shane nabs one followed by Dylan.
Ferg sits patiently out the back, waiting for something none of us can see.
It comes and he strokes in on the absolute wrong side of the peak. His knowledge becomes apparent as he sits tight letting the lip fold right over him, embracing and enclosing him. Fergal doesn’t seem to mind he had his line set before the wave even appeared on the horizon.
Cain is surfing a board much too big for the conditions and pays for it a number of times before he finally cranks hard off the bottom and tickles the face with his right hand. Braking just enough to get hosed by the spit then exit moments later to the hoots of all.
Damo Conway. Having Fun.
Still not completely happy with the workflow.
I definitely prefer the sliders in PS to messing with a curve, maybe I just need more experience.
Ok So I’ve Ubuntu running for nearly a week now, and I’m getting used to my new tools.
I only managed to get Picasa working this morning as there is a bug in the 2.7 version which nobody seems to be trying to fix since the 3.0 Beta version works fine apparently, so at the moment I’m letting build it’s library of shots.
I also installed digiKam and UFraw while trying to get Picasa 2.7 to work. digiKam seems to be a more advanced version of picasa, with more editing options available. Although right now I’m not too gone on the digiKam interface I’m sure I could get used to it soon. One thing I dislike is that it takes a little bit longer to get to the editing than it does with Picasa where the editing tools pop up as soon as you view the big version of the photo, but it’s only one extra click so not the end of the world. Also in digiKam you have to hit update after making any changes to a RAW file to see the how the change affected the photo, this increases editing time and is a lot more annoying than watching the changes as you play with the sliders.
UFraw works a lot more like Photoshop, you pick one photo to edit at a time and you have a lot more control. Bonus points for actually showing the changes as they occur, even if there is a slight lag. There seems to be a good amount of room to play in UFraw and it’ll probably give me all the stuff I need to edit RAW shots in a way I’m happy with. One thing that got me was the lack of a straighten tool (which was very easy to use in PS), if it is there it wasn’t completely obvious (although I didn’t look that hard). Which meant I had to open the new jpeg in digiKam to straighten, as well as resize and add the watermark. Which I used to do in picasa anyway, so not a huge problem.
Below are
1. An unedited RAW to jpeg conversion.
2. A RAW edited using digiKam.
3. A RAW edited using UFraw and then digiKam.
Thoughts, comments and ideas welcome.
Ollie “The Fla” O’Flaherty stalling hard for the pit man.
Get your Buzz on.
From A Day in 2007.
Man I kept some awful shots back then.
Beach Walk
Ferg and Damo
Danny Boy back in the mix after a long time dry docked.
Sponsor Love, Damien Conway.
John McCall
Alex winding up
Damo, half way through a barrel I mostly missed because I got bored and caught a bodywave.
McCall hack.
Stef, should’ve gone left.
John again
Would have been so sweet.
See, end section of above wave.
Head in the clouds. Dan Skajarowski.
Stef Baz.
Ok well not really a bonanza, but there were some barrels.
It took a while to get there but some waves were had last Sunday. I’m not sure what I expected really, but it was mostly sunny, with good winds and a bit of swell, and that sounds like a pretty good day to me.
Most of my trips recently I’ve gone expecting absolute perfection, and, as usual, have been disappointed.
This time I just cruised up, I didn’t even speed, that much. I’d only been to this spot once before so maybe that’s why I didn’t have many expectations. Which was good because it looked awful. Everybody was sitting around wondering why the hell it was so crap. Around the corner the swell was booming, but in this little bay it just wasn’t quite doing it.
“Maybe it’s the tide”
“No it needs more wind to hold it up”
“Hang on let’s just see what this set does”
A lot of excuses were made everybody was itching to get wet, and it was a couple of groms who eventually got my hyped up enough to jump in. Unfortunately, one of them snapped his board straight away and I didn’t get to hook up with the other on any decent ones. Although the kid with the snapped board got his pieces together dropped them back to the van then went bodysurfing for about an hour, getting more barrels than anyone.
Find the stoke where you can.
Barry slotted, who cares about the close out.
Prepping for a session.
Had a GoPro attached to the side of my housing.
Only got one session out of it.
GoPro’s don’t float.
A Day In The Life from Paudie Scanlon on Vimeo.
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)
