One Stubborn Hunk of Metal!

Today involved a lot of this; lying in the quarter berths and contorting ourselves into the back of the engine bay to disconnect everything! Those legs belong to my long-suffering Dad, who generously spent a day off work getting covered in oil and grease with me instead of relaxing or doing anything sensible like that.

I've spent the last two days fighting with an engine which really didn't want to come out of this little boat. The current engine is an extremely old, extremely rusty Yanmar 2QM15. It's been wedged in there and just barely fits, giving the boat about double the horsepower that it really needs. Over the years the various sensors and warning lights have succumbed to the effects of time and salt water but it will take more than that to kill the engine block itself. So it runs, usually, in between bouts of diesel airlocks and electrical issues. Right now it's not running, as the air filter has disintegrated and I think a chunk of it is stuck in one of the intake valve seats. So before the engine goes back into service it needs to come out and be overhauled, cleaned up and painted. 

The engine before we went near it. Note the almost complete lack of space to turn a spanner at the sides of the engine. I suspect that the engine may have been placed in position before the deck moulding was added, because trying to lift it over the studs holding the engine mounts in position turned out to be a total mission because the clearance above it was virtually zero!

We won the battle in the end! Now the engine is sitting in position ready to be lifted out of the companionway, as soon as I figure out exactly what I want to do with it. 

When it's working it's great to have the option to go straight upwind at four or five knots regardless of the conditions, and obviously it's very handy to have the engine for getting in and out of marinas. However, something attracts me to the idea of cruising engineless. There's no better boat for learning the arts of surviving on a sailboat without an auxiliary motor, and it's something I've been working on over the last few years. As it is the engine only comes on if the wind dies or if I need to get into a particularly awkward marina berth. Without the engine there would be no more worries about breakdowns, availability of spare parts, fuel levels, stressing about needing the engine to make it to port for a certain deadline or tidal window. All balanced against the comfort and safety factor of having the engine there to use when it's needed, and always being able to charge the batteries at the push of a button. The fact that I don't have the facilities or equipment to easily do the overhaul job myself is also a factor to consider. So while I haven't 100% decided to ditch the motor, the engine is currently up for sale and I am thinking hard about it.

Rebranded Blog, New Beginning, New Adventure

Friends, meet Moonshine! Moonshine is a 1969 Hurley 22; an Ian Anderson designed "four-berth family sailing yacht" with a near legendary reputation for offshore voyaging. Most notably by Attila Vedo, who started his adventures in Ireland six years ago and is currently cruising in the Pacific on his Hurley 22 called Comino. Hurley 22s have also completed multiple Atlantic crossings and regularly feature in Jester Challenges to the Azores and Rhode Island. Since the 1960s people's idea of a four berth family sailing yacht have changed considerably and these days it would more usually be regarded as a small boat for single people with no friends, but the design's reputation for seaworthiness is as strong as ever!

 Moonshine is currently sitting in a boatyard in Limerick in a pretty forlorn state. I have owned her for the past two years, sailed quite a few miles on the west coast of Ireland in pretty average weather and due to working and travelling haven't found the time to do the maintenance work that I should have done. All of that is about to change and plans that I have been making for the last two years are about to be put into action. After spending so much time coming up with ideas and doing drawings for a lot of upgrades and modifications that I want to make, I am very excited to finally get to work. In case you were wondering, I was planning to do this work before the whole coronavirus thing pressed pause on life as we know it. I hadn't expected be able to focus on the work quite this intensely and I don't think I would have found time to start writing blog posts about it. Every dark cloud and all that!

 My goal for this refit is to upgrade Moonshine from an aging 1960's coastal day-sailor to an up-to-date, go-anywhere cruiser. Once this is completed and I've done a few test sails, (tentatively scheduled for June sometime, progress and coronavirus permitting) I plan to take Moonshine on a single-handed, non-stop voyage around Ireland to thoroughly test out all of the upgrades and modifications that I'll be making over the next few months. Fingers crossed, a lot of things will have to go well for that to happen!

Below are a few photos of Moonshine as she exists currently. My plan is to post regular updates here about how progress is going, and any obstacles encountered along the way. Stay tuned! You can also follow me on Instagram for more regular, less verbose updates; find me at @sail.surf.paddle .

Port side. Before I took these pictures I had already removed the mast and rigging. They're on the ground beside the boat, waiting on the replacement of the standing rigging and just about all of the masthead equipment. You can see the state of the teak toe rail and the broken saloon window where a large lobster fishing boat caused the point of an anchor to be driven through the window when both boats were moored side-to in Achill and the tide went out. (That's a long story!)

The deck looking forward. See how a previous owner has slapped on some household masonry paint without sanding anything first, causing everything to start flaking off? Yeah, that's going to take a bit of time to make look good!

Top deck, looking back. Note the duct tape on the stanchion bases. That was a last resort on my sail from Achill to Limerick at the end of last season in an attempt to reduce the amount of water coming into the cabin. It didn't really work!

Inside, looking aft. Sorry for the poor photo, unfortunately you can't put a wide angle lens on a phone. What you can't see in the picture is the level of damp inside the boat, resulting in rust, mold and lifting varnish in lots of places. My plan is to gut the inside of the boat and essentially start again. 

Inside looking forwards. The bulkhead along with the cupboards will hopefully be taken out to give me access to the deck to hull joint and chain plates, which I plan to reinforce before rearranging the layout of the boat to give more usable cooking facilities and storage spaces while at sea.

Dream Tour Part 6: Sure if everything went well there would be nothing to talk about...

So, I ended the last post with us surfing ourselves silly in Capbreton, building back up the confidence after getting hammered the day before. We probably could have happily surfed that wave for a week but by then we decided that we had spent a couple of days in the area and it was time to keep moving south.

The beautiful city of Biarritz was the next stop on our trip. The tide looked a bit high on the city centre beaches when we arrived and they were still pretty crowded, so we kept moving until we found a sweet looking peak at the south end of the city.

This is what was waiting to greet us at the top of the cliff where we decided to go surfing. We decided the best way to proceed was to cross our fingers that the locals weren't too hardcore and go surfing regardless! We ended up having a great session, with perfect head high waves and a chilled out crowd on the water. 

One of the highlights of Biarritz was seeing the local grom school get on the water, around half an hour after the school bells rang. Just as in Ireland we have hurling/football/rugby/whatever training after school, in Biarritz a big group of ten to fifteen year old kids gets on the water with coaches on the shore recording and critiqueing every move. All of a sudden there were airs being thrown left right and centre, along with all sorts of other crazy turns and high performance surfing. The kids could surf better than anyone I've seen on the water in Ireland and it was definitely an eye opener as to what's possible on a board if you put the time in!

Moving on from Biarritz after a couple of sessions, we headed for Zarautz in the Basque country. This spot was reccommended by a local surf kayaker who turned out to be bang on. It's an awesome old town with great pinxtos and kebabs, and some lovely small, clean surf. 

Lunchtime in between surf sessions in Zarautz, with scrambled eggs cooked at a bus stop providing sustenance for the day. It's quite a classy looking place and the locals definitely aren't used to tourists cooking lunch in the middle of the footpath!

Unfortunately we had a less than ideal end to our time in Zarautz. Mark had a wipeout in the shorebreak which resulted in a chunk of fiberglass from his board entering his mouth below his bottom lip and then lodging in his top teeth. This pinned his mouth closed and stopped him from talking, so it took myself and Adam a while to figure out what was going on!

Despite Mark's pleasant new demeanour and the new-found peace and quiet in the car, as soon as we realised that the reason Mark wasn't talking to us was that there was a piece of surfboard lodged in his mouth myself and Adam agreed that it would be bad form to take advantage and leave him like that for a while and that we had to go and sort it out. We plugged 'hospital' into the GPS and aimed for the nearest result, which was about an hour away in San Sebastian. ...one of the problems of driving on the continent is that the driver's seat is on the wrong side of the car. For this trip the driver's life was complicated by the fact that the entire space behind the passenger seat in the Fiesta was packed from floor to ceiling with camping gear. This meant that the driver was totally reliant on the passenger to be his eyes on the road, keeping an eye on the gaping blind spot and letting the driver know if it was safe to change lane or not. Anyway, we totally forgot about this key duty of the passenger, threw Mark into the passenger seat and took off for San Sebastian. All went well for a while; we drove through beautiful mountain roads at dusk, unfortunately spending more time trying to figure out exactly what was wrong with Mark and how we were going to explain it to a doctor when we found one than admiring the view. 

When we reached San Sebastian, all hell broke loose! By the time we got there darkness had fallen, rush hour had well and truly begun, and I have never seen craziness like it on a road ever before in my life! Layers upon layers of motorways, stacked four high at some of the busier interchanges, roundabouts within roundabouts within entrance ramps, traffic merging and leaving every hundred metres or so, all filled with crazy Basque people in an awful rush home to do whatever Basque people do at night. Add to this a GPS which was just slightly too slow to tell us which lane or exit we should be taking and a total lack of signposts, and you can guess what kind of a job we did of finding the hospital. Around an hour later, after many near death experiences and on our third trip around the city, Mark's grunts were getting urgent enough to be translated to 'I really need to get to a hospital now' and we finally rolled into a hospital car park. We explained to the staff on the desk in attempted Spanish that we needed someone who spoke English, and approximately what the problem was. They said that they would get someone with more English, and also that this was a private hospital and Mark would need to prove that he had insurance before they would do anything for him. So while we were waiting for an English speaker I got onto Mark's parent's on the phone, trying my best to explain that Mark was fine, but couldn't talk and could I please have his health insurance information...

Eventually, a pleasant, English speaking doctor showed up who explained that this was in fact a private day hospital which didn't have an emergency department. So they wouldn't be able to do anything for Mark even if his insurance was underwritten by God himself... While quietly exploding inside, myself and Adam politely asked were we far from an actual A&E department (no, we weren't), could they tell us how to get there (Not a chance, sure we had seen the state of the roads already, they were way too complicated for directions and it obviously wasn't signposted), and could he find it on our GPS (the initial answer was yes, but after ten or fifteen minutes of searching our friendly doctor decided it wasn't on the GPS). So we decided that the best course action would be to put Mark in a taxi and get him to a hospital while myself and Adam aimlessly drove around San Sebastian looking for him. We were reluctant to split up since Mark couldn't talk, none of us spoke Spanish and none of us knew where we were, so thankfully just as our taxi pulled up the driveway I somehow found the emergency department on the GPS. So we said good luck and thanks to the hospital staff and ran out of there before we had to face the taxi driver and explain why we didn't really need him any more!

After another unintentional detour or two around San Sebastian we found ourselves having a heated argument with a talking car park barrier outside a hospital, which it turned out was trying to tell us that the car park we were trying to force our way into was for staff only. At this point Mark gave up on us and took flight out of the car, deciding that he could do a better job of finding A&E on foot. And he was right. I found him a few minutes later at the A&E desk, trying to explain his problem to the unfortunate receptionist using a combination of grunts and hand gestures. In fairness, once we had explained the issue using sign language and sketched pictures things moved incredibly quickly. A cute doctor appeared to try and open Mark's mouth, and when she couldn't sent him away for an x-ray to see what was going on. The x-ray didn't seem to have done much, and the doctor seemed pretty confused as to what the problem was when Mark got back. Myself and Adam did our best to try to explain what was going on and the doctor did a really good job of pretending she understood what we were saying, so when two doctors, three interns and a nurse or two came back to pump Mark full of anasthetic and have a closer look we thought they had a pretty good idea of what they were dealing with. However the look of shock, horror, awe and disgust that appeared on the entire group's faces when they finally managed peel Mark's lip away from the chunk of fiberglass stuck between his teeth revealed that whatever they had been expecting to find it wasn't that!

Cue a high-five from Mark for the doctor, big smiles all around, and that was the hard part of the job finished. They spent a while picking shards of fiberglass out of the hole in Mark's lip and from between his teeth, and then washed everything out and stitched it inside and out. After we had avoided a couple of awkward questions like 'where are you staying tonight?' and where will you be in a week's time when these stitches need to come out?' we were free to continue on our merry way. At this stage we were all starving so we splashed out and found a half decent carbonara at a supermarket food court, while Mark bought himself a bottle of vodka for when the painkillers wore off. Then we went off to try to find a flat patch of ground to try to pitch tents on in what must be one of the hilliest areas in the world! That was quite the struggle and by the time we found something even borderline suitable it was the early hours of the morning and we were all flat out exhausted. I don't think I've ever been as happy to climb into bed as that night at the edge of a field half way up a Basque mountain! 

All's well that ends well, or something like that... he could still breath through the lower lip, and it leaked when he was drinking for a while, but it was an impressively tidy stitching job from the team at San Sebastian A&E! A couple of days off the water and it was as good as new, with plenty of surfing still to be done during the trip.

After the day we just had you would think we were due a run of especially good luck. Unfortunately though that's not exactly how it worked out! Check back in a couple of days time for the next update on the calamity tour, I promise that the next post will be just as excitement-filled as this one!! 

Dream Tour Part 5: Moving Further Afield!

So, it's been a while since I checked in here! Those who have been following me on Instagram (keyes_92 if you're interested!) will know that's not because I have been sitting around doing nothing for the past month or so! The next couple of posts here will tell the story of an epic road trip down the west coast of Europe with surfboards on the roof, searching out all the legendary waves along the way. As well as waves we found awesome scenery, beautiful towns and villages, great people and lived a rollercoaster couple of weeks as we negotiated hurdles ranging from thieving bastards in the Basque country to storms in the Algarve. If you would like to know more, stay tuned and I'll eventually get around to putting the whole experience into words!

The Irish boys on tour...the sun comes out, the tops come off and locals and camera sensors alike get blinded by the pasty white flesh on show! You wouldn't get that in Ireland in November!

To start off, how did we come up with the idea of a surf trip in the first place? Which is a big question considering that none of us surf all that much! The whole idea started out with us looking for a destination which would have water for kayaking in late autumn and would be reasonably cheap to get to. The Pyrenees were the obvious answer, however the more we looked into that plan the more cumbersome it became. Since the only vehicles we owned were myself and Adam's Fiestas and doing such a long trip in one of those would be a ridiculous idea we talked about getting a van or large estate car for the trip. Bringing kayaks would mean bringing heavy and bulky kayaking gear plus a bike or ideally a mini-moto style bike for shuttles, so we looked into adding a trailer. The trailer would then have allowed us to bring surf boards and possibly even mountain bikes. However although doing a combined surfing, kayaking and biking trip sounds like amazing fun when you first think of it, the practicalities and cost of dragging all of that gear the length of Europe and then constantly driving from the sea up into the mountains and back means that it doesn't really make sense. Since we were going to be camping all the way, the idea of a destination with sunshine and surf was much more appealing than chasing rain for kayaking. So, after months of discussion on the topic it was decided that we would be doing a surf trip down the coast of Europe, essentially driving south until we found sunny weather and warm water!

In the end, after much talk of buying estate cars and vans, we took the cheap and lazy way out and decided to take one of the cars we had to hand. Adam's Fiesta is a 1.4 auto while mine is a 1.2 manual which can barely haul me and my own kit up some of the steeper hills in Kerry! Even with the 1.4 it was well tested on some of the roads we found ourselves driving during the trip.

So we ended up packing up Adam's car with enough camping gear, cooking gear and toys to let us survive out of it pretty much indefinitely. With the roof box, it all just about fitted in. The food and cooking gear took up pretty much the whole boot, the three pop-up tents went behind the passenger seat and all the clothes bags went behind them. Adding a guitar, ukelele and drum filled up the rest of the space we had inside the car! ...because on a surf trip you obviously have to be prepared for the inevitable flat days! The roof box was reserved for the wet or bulky bits like camping chairs, wetsuits, skateboards, snorkeling gear, gas bottle and spear gun. It took a bit of persuasion to get it closed before we figured out a system for fitting everything in there!

Campsite number one in La Sauzaie, France! After we got off the ferry in Cherbourg we decided to give Brittany a skip since the climate is too similar to Ireland's and hit the road south. We made it as far as La Sauzaie before throwing out the tents for the first time, hoping to wake up to perfect waves breaking on the A-frame reef right in front of the tents!

Unfortunately, our holiday didn't start out exactly according to plan. Rather than of pumping surf we woke up to strong onshore winds, no waves and lashing rain. Instead of cooking breakfast in the rain and getting soaked, we threw the tents back into the car as fast as possible and went looking for somewhere more sheltered. We ended up at this carwash outside a Lidl down the road which did the job perfectly! Thankfully it was unattended and we were able to cook up our first pot of porridge in relative shelter, while getting some queer looks off the locals going in and out of Lidl!

Useful information for anyone planning a similar trip: it is virtually impossible to find porridge in France! (by which I mean Lidl don't have it and we weren't prepared to go looking in too many more expensive shops for it) After cooking breakfast we decided that the most productive way to use the rainy weather was to spend it driving south. We spent the day driving, getting used to being on the wrong side of the road and experimenting with drafting behind trucks to save fuel. We got as far as Hossegor before deciding to pull in for the night and set a course for the nearest beach, hoping to find shelter from the rain and wind.

We lucked out big time when we went looking for shelter at Les Estangots beach just north of Hossegor! This three-walled shelter was angled perfectly to shelter us from the weather, and allowed us to spend a couple of days in peace while we waited for the conditions to improve enough for us to sample the renowned beach breaks in the area. The mixture of racist, anarchist and anti-xenophobic graffiti was also pretty interesting!

On the opposite side of of a large sand dune from our luxory accommodation was this world war two bunker, one of many in the area. It was possible to climb in the door in the picture and out onto the roof, giving a great view over the endless beach that the area is famous for. We were here around the time of the 'supermoon', which was indeed incredibly bright given the beautifully clear skies overhead and the bunker provided an awesome platform for stargazing at night!

After one cold, wet day spent fishing and sampling locally made pastries in Hossegor, the next morning dawned bright and clear and we were finally able to go searching for our first waves of the trip. The banks at Les Estangots didn't look great so we moved down the coast before settling on a peak where we saw two surfers in the water, casually tucking into chest high barrels just north of the world famous peak at La Graviere. They got off the water just as we were getting on, which was our first clue that everything might not be hunky dory on the water! We hit the water confident and full of enthusiasm after our couple of days cooped up in the car, jumping into the water and paddling out without a second thought. After all, this was a beach break and what could possibly go wrong?! The next hint that the day might not totally go to plan came when we reached the impact zone and discovered that the waves here had slightly more power to them than your average Irish beach break! After several not-quite-deep-enough duck dives and the associated gentle poundings, we convened out back and went hunting for waves. Which is when we discovered that take-offs on chest high barreling waves are much steeper and trickier than on similarly sized waves at your average Irish beach! After several more poundings following failed take-off attempts, Adam finally took off on a wave and made the drop, surfing all the way to the inside. Around this time, we discovered why the other surfers had got off the water when the mother of all long-shore rips started moving, meaning that non-stop paddling was required to stay in position and that when you finally found yourself in position for a wave, we were too knackered to put a meaningful effort in to catching them. Leading to more poundings. So we headed for the beach to catch our breath and make a new plan. Which ended up being identical to the old plan; ignorantly paddling straight out in the general direction of a channel leading to a good-looking peak. We immediately found ourselves being dragged down the beach faster than we were moving out, leaving us directly in front of the peak we were hoping to surf and getting pounded a few more times! By the time we finally admitted defeat we had drifted a solid couple of hundred metres down the beach, and decided to study the other surfers on the water for a while before starting the long walk back to the car.

It turns out that we are spoiled rotten here in Ireland with our uber-mellow beach breaks and nearly as mellow reefs. Most of which back off into deep water with a dry paddle back rather than closing out. Of course we have higher quality waves on offer if you go looking for them but it's very easy to spend your time surfing easy breaks and fool yourself into thinking that you're a competent surfer! As I certainly did before starting this trip. After watching the vastly more competent surfers on the water at La Graviere a pattern emerged, which seemed blindingly obvious as soon as we saw it. The secret to paddling out here was to be just inside the impact zone, at a channel, at the time a lull started. Which meant wading as far as possible off the beach during the previous set, far enough along the beach that the cross-shore drift would leave you in the right place when the lull came. Which if the rip was strong enough would be well in front of the next peak. Once you get out back and catching waves, make sure to peel off them before they close unless you want some serious duck dive practice and are feeling very fit! Mis-timing this whole routine would leave you with a set wave landing on your head, and these had so much water behind them that they would push you so far down the beach that you might as well head in and start again! It's all simple, basic stuff which makes it easier to paddle out anywhere, but just how critical it was to paddling out in France was certainly an eye-opener for me! 

With our tails firmly between our legs we headed back to the car to cook a pot of scrambled eggs and make a plan for the afternoon. In the guidebook we found a break nicknamed 'Kiddies Corner' just down the road in Capbreton which sounded perfect for us considering what we had just been through! At 'Kiddies Corner' we found a beautiful, small, mellow high tide shore break, which had an easy take-off followed by a short ride before closing out pretty much on the beach. We surfed there until dark, trying to wipe the memories of the morning from the system. The layout of the beach looked like it would have waves at low tide in the morning so we cooked dinner in the carpark, went for a wander around the town and waited until most people would have gone to bed before throwing up our tents directly on the beach, in the hope of not being disturbed at least until we had a good nights sleep! The last screw-up of the day came when we called into a local bar to grab some wi-fi and were charged €21.50 for three beers, which felt like a final punch from a day whose main priority was beating the daylights out of us! 

 

Waking up in Capbreton the next morning to this view was pretty special! Glorious sunshine, warm water, warm air, and beautiful small, clean, mellow surf. We threw down a quick breakfast and then spent most of the day on the water, just cruising around and chilling out in some of the most relaxed waves imaginable, just what was needed after the utterly demoralising time we had the day before!

That's where I'm going to leave the story for the moment because if I tried to fit this trip into one post it would start to resemble a book, and if I thought people were interested in reading a novel that's what I'd create instead! Check back over the next couple of days for the next portion of the journey, when shit really hits the fan and we're left wondering if some higher power really doesn't want us to go surfing at all! Happy Christmas, happy New Year to you and your family, and if you enjoyed reading this post and are looking forwards to the next update give it a share around the internet so that other people can have a chuckle at our progress!

Dream Tour Part 4: Let's Kick Things Up A Gear!

So, this Dream Tour rubbish, what's the craic? A couple of weeks in north west Ireland, what's the big deal? It is cool and everything, but not exactly exotic? I would argue that the west coast of Ireland is what the best dreams are made of, but that's slightly beside the point! The point is that around the age of twelve, before I ever got involved in kayaking and shortly after joining the Limerick Scout Group which kicked off all this outdoor malarkey for me in the first place, I had the opportunity to try out a friend's surfboard in Lahinch. I had spent years bodyboarding on family holidays to west Cork, loving the waves and the water but always feeling a little bit jealous of the guys out back on the surf boards. So finally getting a go on a board was a big deal! I vividly remember the feeling of flying along in front of the whitewater that first time I stood up, and totally falling in love with a new sport, and indeed a new way of life! Over the next couple of years the hurling, football and rugby that I was playing at the time fell by the wayside, the Sunday Game lost out to surf movies and the walls of my room became plastered in photos of people tucking in to emerald green barrels in remote corners of the world.

Ireland's west coast on fire a few weeks ago. It's definitely the stuff dreams are made of but I feel like travelling slightly further afield and hopefully finding some warmer water to play in! 

 Over the next couple of years I surfed as often as I could get a lift to the beach, built boards for myself in the back garden, and dreamed up various plans for surfing perfect waves in warm water. Eventually I got involved in kayaking which totally took over from surfing when I started building up for my first international surf kayak competitions, but the dreams of surfing perfect waves were still tucked away in a corner of my brain somewhere. Those are the dreams that this 'Dream Tour' is about! One of the more achievable ones is the classic Eurosurf road trip down west coast of France and into Spain and Portugal, surfing on every working peak along the way. Luckily, Mark Scanlon and Adam McEvoy happen to be free at the moment and up for the same kind of antics that I am, so on the 10th of November we're loading up Adam's Fiesta with surfing and camping gear and catching a ferry to France! Fingers crossed we'll score some epic surf as the north Atlantic winter starts churning out swell, and the weather will be a whole lot warmer than Ireland at this time of year! The eventual target of this road trip is somewhere near Lagos in Portugal, where we hope to stay for a short while and catch some consistent surf while minimising the spend on petrol. The whole plan is pretty flexible though, and who really knows where we'll end up! Keep an eye on this blog and follow keyes_92 on Instagram to keep up to date with progress, at the very least I'm sure we'll come home with some funny stories to tell!

The time since Cranafest hasn't exactly been spent relaxing! I've been surfing almost every day, did a club trip to Donegal, climbed Ben Bulben and did a multi-day sea kayaking expedition in Clare, where we saw whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals pretty much simultaneously!

"After Portugal" is a pretty distant thought at the moment. There are a couple of ideas floating around, including kayaking in Morocco in spring, snowboarding in Norway or possibly passing the whole winter in Portugal, picking up a job and relaxing in the sunshine! Only time will tell, if anyone hears of any jobs going that involve working on or around boats, or outdoor brands looking for people to test out kit it would be great to hear of them! Regardless of what happens in the meantime though, next summer will hopefully be spent surf kayaking in Ireland, preparing for the world Championships in Northern Ireland in October. My thinking is that the breaks are quiet, will be relatively consistent and I can surf spots which are similar to the competition sites in Portrush, so after a summer preparing I should be set up to perform pretty well up there! The next post here will contain the secret to fitting three guys, surfing gear, camping gear and a bunch of other toys in to the back of a Ford Fiesta... it should be pretty entertaining; stay tuned!