Wind whips up waves of fun for surfers

When storms hit most people head indoors and hope the slates stay on the roof — but not Ireland’s small team of big wave surfers.

Storm Christine has left many households and local authorities counting the cost, but for the surfing community the recent storms were an opportunity to tackle some extraordinary waves caused by the gale force winds blazing in off the Atlantic.

As these images captured off the Co Sligo coast at Mullaghmore prove, the worst weather can act as a magnet for those who live for high waves.

International surfers such as American Kurt Rist, as well as surfers from Portugal and England, travelled to the Sligo coast last weekend and among those who entered the water last Sunday was Sligo man Conor Flanagan.

A 23-year-old from Strand Hill, the bodyboarder has spent much of the past seven years in the water and had been tuned to the weather forecasts for news of the big waves coming in off the Atlantic.

“We knew for a few days that the storm was coming in so I went down in the morning time,” he said.

With a friend he watched the waves building from a vantage point on land and made plans to travel out.

While some sought to paddle out, others, including tow boarders tackling the largest waves, needed the help of water skis to bring them out.

The dramatic images, shot by Michal Czubala of Offshore Watersports Mullaghmore gained an international following, and Conor said Jan 6 was “a big day”. Maybe surprisingly, he said there had been expectations of even bigger waves.

“We kind of expected it to be double the size — we thought they would be even bigger,” he said.

As it was 20ft waves were plentiful and some had faces of between 25ft-30ft. Conor said he was in the water for more than two hours but others stayed in for more than four.

“From first light the big waves were coming in and they kept coming in all day,” he said.

Another surfer, Dublin-based fireman Peter Conroy, said the media attention on the big wave surfing last weekend was a little odd, given that many of the same people had surfed even larger waves with no cameras present a few weeks before.

Peter, 34, works in Phibsboro fire station but spends half the week at a house in Miltown Malbay. He began surfing “on and off” when he started lifeguarding the beaches in Clare as a 17-year-old and has taken it seriously for the past decade.

“The waves we were going for were bigger and deeper, you can only tow into them,” he explained. His tow partner is Ollie Flaherty and they took it in turns to tow the other into the larger barrels.

The daredevil aspect of this type of surfing prompts the obvious question: isn’t this all a bit dangerous? Peter has a very reasonable answer to that.

“There is [a risk] but as I say to everybody, it’s a calculated risk — we are very well trained. Firemen go into burning buildings but we’re very highly trained to do it so nobody really takes any notice of it.

“Where we go the RNLI can’t rescue us a lot of the time, so we have to be able to self rescue.”

He said there were two water skis used exclusively for safety last weekend, with Dublin Fire Brigade paramedics on standby on shore in case anything went wrong and various safety equipment, including defibrillators, on hand.

While finding the sudden burst of media attention a little bemusing, he admits that the swell that smashed into the town of Lahinch was unprecedented in his lifetime. While landlubbers hope they’ve seen the back of the storms, Peter and co already have their eyes trained on the weather forecasts.

While the rest of us will probably batten down the hatches, Peter, with an air of expectation, says: “It’s supposed to be another big one this Wednesday.”