Waking up to a beautiful sunrise over Brandon Bay and the Maharees.
The first big destination after finishing work a month ago was the surf kayak home internationals and British open in Portrush, Northern Ireland this week. I spent the last couple of weeks surfing my ass off in County Kerry and training as hard as possible, taking the occasional break to do some windsurfing and rescue boat work. We got a fairly consistent run of surf during the month and by the end of it things were starting to come together. I camped out in some really cool places, had some great surf sessions at various spots around Brandon bay and put a lot of work into more aggressive lip turns and more consistent end moves. I was really looking forward to the journey north and surfing heats against some tough competition.
Looking up at the Cliffs of Moher from the bottom of the goat track at Ail na Searrach.
On my way north I visited the UL kayak club on their annual migration to Lahinch. It was great to do some surfing at a different spot, meet a lot of old friends and visit the Cliffs of Moher again. Most importantly, a party like that is not to be missed! After a crazy weekend of surfing, partying and generally having the craic, the drive up to Antrim on Sunday felt like it took forever!
The surf kayak home internationals at Portrush. Not much surf but at least the sun is shining!
The surf kayak home internationals is a bi-annual team competition between Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This year's competition was held in Portrush by the Canoe Association of Northern Ireland as a practice run for next year's world championships, and when I arrived last Sunday the surf was small and dropping. We had a few nice freesurf sessions at a couple of breaks around the area but by Wednesday and the start of the event there was barely a ripple around. Since that was the best we were going to get it was decided to run off as much of the team competition as possible while the waves were just about contestable, which meant doing a full 12 hour plus day on the bench.
Despite the generally terrible waves, there were occasional opportunities to build a bit of speed and hit oncoming sections. This end move was by far the most fun moment of the day, the boat came around effortlessly! Photo by Donie McLoughlin.
Competing in marginal surf is infuriating to say the least but at the end of the day everyone has to make the most of the same waves, and the same surfers will generally come out on top regardless of the conditions. As a team we were consistent, with a couple of standout heats from Sheelagh, Alan and others helping to hold us up the leader board. Unfortunately consistency wasn't enough to beat England who were surfing very strongly all day. Still, second place in any international competition isn't a bad result, we'll just have to keep working on it and come back stronger next year! Despite the surf, Ashley and his team put on a great event and I'm sure that next year's world championships here will be a cracker. Unfortunately the British Open competition had to be cancelled due to the surf forecast so the next event on the calender is now the surf kayak Irish Open in Easky next weekend. We have been very lucky with conditions for that one for the last few years so hopefully that will continue. Fingers crossed!
The plan for the next week is to leisurely travel over to Easky, via as many surf spots as possible and aiming to get there for Thursday or so to get a few days on the water there before the competition starts. It should be a great week, there's a lot of surfing to be done between Portrush and Easky!
No comments:
Post a Comment