Blue health: How time by the sea can improve your health

Easkey Britton’s life revolves around the sea, from relaxation to work. Her research into blue health builds a strong case for spending more time in and near the ocean. We’re an island nation, so taking to the water couldn’t be easier

Easkey Britton Credit James Connolly

Dr Easkey Britton is named after one of her dad’s favourite wave breaks at Easky on the Sligo coast — her name also sounds like iasc, the Irish word for fish. The champion big-wave surfer and now blue-health scientist has spent her life embodying her name, with life and work centred around the sea. Specifically, the cold Irish Sea of the north-west.

She was born into a surfing family. In the mid-1960s her grandmother, a hotelier in Rossnowlagh, Co Donegal, bought two surfboards back from Malibu (“enormous 10-foot boards”) ostensibly for hotel guests, who had no idea what to do with them. Her dad, Barry, who was 12 at the time, and his four brothers used the boards to float on the water. “They hadn’t a clue what to do; they’d never seen surfing,” she says. No wetsuits, no board wax, no YouTube. They spent the first year lying flat on the boards, until they saw a foreign visitor standing up, and realised there was a whole other level to it.