Damien Enright: At loggerheads: when paddleboarder and turtle met at sea

It's an astounding picture of a loggerhead turtle; and how a man standing on a paddleboard, on a moving sea, could snap it is truly amazing.

JoseRa Relloso filmed it about a kilometre off the coast of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands. The turtle was passing Gomera on its five-year journey circling the Sargasso Sea, on the North Atlantic gyre, from its natal beaches in Florida, and stopped by JoseRa’s board to ‘hangout’.

It liked the board and cosied up, giving Relloso a chance to take numerous photos and a short video. I’ll see if a link can be made and I can provide details for readers to access it on their PCs or phones.

JoseRa is a young bank official, and father of toddler twins. In his spare time, he takes his board, three metres long, into the surf, stands up on it (he’s very tall and angular), and paddles off, with a single sculling-type oar, out to sea. He goes miles out and seems to be able to ride quite mountainous swells, and even big, breaking waves.

Many of the Gomeros young men (strangely enough, few or no women) are expert surfers and rush to the sea whenever the waves are running in long, evenly-breaking lines onto the 500m beach, and over the rocks, at each end of it. Watching them makes my hair stand on end. My son is one of the fraternity.

He learned his fluent Spanish on a surfboard during the year he spent at school in Gomera. Well, while you’re sitting out there on a board, waiting for the perfect wave, with a few mates around you, there’s not much to do but talk and watch the sea.

Thus, he made lifelong friends and the kind of Spanish that prompts native speakers from elsewhere to ask what obscure corner of the Spanish-speaking world he comes from. Andalucía via South America would be a guess.

I watch him and the Gomero surfers with my heart in my mouth, as they glide in over the rocky platforms, once the tide covers them with half a metre of water, swerving past submerged outcrops and sierras, and departing the board in a perfectly calculated wipe-out, seconds before they crash.

When coming in to Doolin on a boat from the Aran Islands, I’ve seen surfers under the Cliffs of Moher, who have made my hair equally stand on end and my head shake in incredulity that they could so expertly ride mountainous seas, over outcrops of jagged-toothed rocks, with such nonchalance and balletic grace, as curtains of spray fly over them.

Cliffs of Moher

Oh, had surfing reached Ireland (or the Mediterranean) when I was any age under 50, I would have taken to it like a dolphin to water! I was a strong, enthusiastic swimmer and loved the sea.

It’s a bit late now to start swimming out on a board to catch the waves and come gliding in on the big rollers, ducking and diving under the curl and flying out of the tunnel to climb again to the crest.

Surfing was before my time, but a lot of other excitements weren’t, so I have no regrets. Swimming in the Med, I had flying fish rocketing around me; swimming overarm in the Ionian Sea, under star-filled skies, I had phosphorescence dripping from my shoulders like silver.

There were bootlace eels to catch for the fun of it in every stream, trout galore in pristine rivers, curlews’ nests in every bog, and the right to travel everywhere without electronic eye-scans and finger-printing, as we now experience when we, Irish citizens, arrive home in our own land.

It’s losses for the children of my children that I regret most: the birds they will never hear or see, the corncrakes calling, the yellowhammers that caught the sun on the telegraph wires on the car-less roads, as we cycled home from swimming holes in local rivers on summer evenings; the swifts that sped down the town streets and past our ears; the white owls we saw as we drove home in the family car from the seaside most every Sunday night in summer; the country people, gathered at a dancing platform with the sound of a squeezebox and maybe a fiddle reaching us through the open windows; the countrymen at crossroads, cigarette butts glowing.

How an article intended to be about the migration of the loggerhead turtle on the Gulf Stream ended in nostalgia is beyond me.

The migrations of the turtles would have been more interesting than my meanderings, but, please, forgive me the diversion.