Paudies Photoblog

Damien Conway, fucking stylish. I love the trail on it.

The Redneck Manifesto, live photos from the gig where I took the video.

Liam Joyce.  The spray on this one is mad.

What is fairness?

Something we think we deserve because we’re good people?

Who cares? Who decides? There is no fairness.

You try to be a good person, because if you treat everyone fairly well then you’ll receive the same in return, right?

Bullshit.

I’m sick of it.

And whatever about people you can forget about fairness from anywhere else.

Last 15 surf trips been skunks?

So what, so is this one.

This time all out hard work will pay off. Oh wait, there’s nobody keeping score about how diligent you are, the last time you got something worthwhile.

Waves? Sure here’s a perfect looking swell.

Photos? Hah you’re joking right? Here’s a fog so thick you can’t even see the waves from beach.

Dream on sunny-jim.

Ok, ok. Here’s some sunshine at a shite beach break and reef  that isn’t breaking properly.

Good luck to you.

I’m sick of it.

There is no fairness.

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.

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)

There’ll always be another swell.

But it’s hard to remember that when you’re missing the swell today. Newly wed Tom Doidge-Harrison on one of his DH designs.

Especially when there’s good light.

But we all have to make choices, and surfing isn’t the only thing to take photos of.

I really really hope this is a spoof, found this link on postsurf.com

http://watermanleague.com/index.php

SUPs are the most ridiculous unfunctional piece of water equipment available.

I’m all for using whatever board suits the conditions from long board to lids, but I have yet to see any place where SUPs have any benefit over any other board unless it’s flat and that puts them in the same category as kayaks.

This video makes me think it’s definitely a spoof. The whole “Out of control” thing followed by guys not in control of their boards.

SUP World Tour

In other news check out Kelly’s crazy boards for J-Bay, which is live here. Trials are on today.

As in foot.

I love new places. I don’t like travelling though anyone who says that is silly. Being in new places is awesome I’m all for that.

Travelling is sitting in some contraption for hours on end getting a sore arse and possibly a headache. The day they get a teleporter working on humans will be a happy day indeed.

I do too much of it and I hardly ever leave Munster let alone Ireland.

So it was with a heavy heart that I made plans to head towards Bundy last weekend. Nice medium size swell, winds were a bit strong but offshore and most importantly there was going to be clear skies. The plan was to leave Cork around 4am, should be able to do Cork to Bundy in about 4 1/2 hours without killing yourself and probably 5 1/2 hours coming home in the evening when normal sane people are driving.

So calls were made making sure that there would surfers willing to head in my general direction while surfing. Days went by and the forecast was staying the same. Bugger guess I’ll have to the drive after all. Now for the most part I can handle fairly long drives I’ve bloody enough of them, I just freak myself out a little bit when I lose concentration a little and suddenly find I’ve driven ten miles without really being aware of what exactly happened. I try to tell myself that my brain is actually working fine just not bothering to store away anything it’s processing, but for all I know I could have been driving as straight as this tide line made entirely of empty limpet shells (weird, but cool)

I just get a sore arse and start getting bored after the third hour usually. Although I once had to do a drive from Cork to LA with no radio and nobody to talk to and went a little bit crazy.

Anyway, the clouds kicked in Saturday evening so the call was made not to bother going to Bundy. Ten hour round trip for cloudy waves was deemed silly. So I decided to head West in search of waves for my own pleasure. I haven’t searched the coast south of the Shannon properly at all and felt like finding some new waves.

So I got a sleep-in and only got up at 0600

But the dawn was gorgeous and I actually listened to my own advice and stopped the car randomly when I saw a nice scene, resulting in the shot below over some random lake in Cork.

The problem with most of Cork and Kerry is that it’s all big mountains and steep cliffs, so you get the odd fickle beachy but not many reefs. So I decided to go exploring. My plan was to try and discover some new epic reef that’s perfectly sheltered in a SW wind. (Why is it always epic why can’t it just be a nice normal wave)

I found a road that went most of the way up a mountain and then got me wellies on. Actually I started walking in my runners then went back and changed after I saw the terrain. Good old bog and marsh.

There was a bit of steep hill but it didn’t look that bad, and anyway I had wellies. I could walk through anything.

About ten minutes into my hike, the steep hill was reclassified as mountain. Tiring but still at the fun stage. I reached the top of the first ridge after about another 20 minutes. Mountains are bigger than they look. Scrambled up over the ridge to find a herd of crazy shaggy and horned sheep (Sorry, no photos, camera firmly secured in my backpack for the epic ascent). The sheep did a legger and I was left with the sight of another feckin’ 400-500m of climbing to do (normal distance not vertical)  (was feckin’ steep though). At this stage I wandered hopelessly off my planned path, but I didn’t know where the hell I was so it didn’t matter too much.

Two more ridges later and I got to the summit. The only problem being that there was a big plateau in the direction of the sea so I had to do more trekking to actually see any water. This was about an hour in and I was starting to think I should have brought some food, water or at least my phone with me. Also conditions were shite for photos mostly cloudy boringness in one direction and horribly glarey sun in the other.

I eventually managed to find somewhere overlooking the bay I had been heading for and I realised how far above sea level I was.

Some nice lines bending in and fairly sheltered by the look of it but no way in hell I was going back for my gear, back up and down into the bay, and then back up out after a surf.

Still it was worth the trek, all I need now is a ski or a boat. Hey at least I’ll have something to keep saving for after I get my new rig.

Oh and everywhere else was blown out and shite, but I did make it back to the house in time for lunch

And again.

Model: Glen Hall (he’s Irish ye know)

Sorry for the lack of postage.

There has been waves.

More B-roll to come in the next few days as I get through the shots.

Stef Skaj above.