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Music festival goers celebrated the announcement of a brand new festival over the weekend with the launch of the Valentia Isle Festival, co-funded by the Rural Development Programme. The festival, which takes place from September 14-16th 2012 is set to attract music lovers, outdoor enthusiasts and Zen seekers alike to the picturesque island off the coast of southwest Kerry with what has been deemed Europe’s only “music and mingling” festival.

The Valentia Isle Festival marks the first time that the picturesque island has been used as a location for a boutique music festival. The unique festival concept will see special dating and matchmaking workshops mixed with some of Ireland’s top musicians perform to more than 1,000 people. Valentia Island will be home to three main stages with headliners performing in The Big Top, while the Paddy Mirage tent will host roots/folk/reggae and Traditional talents. A special Chill Out tent will see DJs perform from early afternoon in to the Valentia starry night.

The eclectic three-day festival will see a banquet of artists take to the stage from Ireland and beyond, including The Rubber Bandits, Jerry Fish, Donal Dineen & Guests, The Frank & Walters, This Club, Tieranniesaur, FRED, Daniel Martin Moore, The Young Folk, Toby Kaar, DJ Kormac & Ham Sandwich with many more to be announced in the coming weeks.

While music reverberates around the beautiful Kerry Island throughout the weekend, Ireland’s modern matchmaker Avril Mulcahy a.k.a Miss Singlelista will shake-up the singles scene with power flirting workshops and dating activities. The festival site will also host an array of ‘fringe’ activities such as local crafts and art installations, holistic therapies, and an artisan food village. Festival goers can enjoy easy access to all of the island’s amenities and outdoor activities including canoeing, cycling, surfing and panoramic walks.

The popular Valentia Island half marathon also takes place on Saturday 15 th for those who are up for an extra challenge, with the spectacular course overlooking the Blasket Islands, the Skelligs and the wild Atlantic Ocean. Speaking at the launch, Anthea Murphy, local business woman and Valentia Isle Festival Director said, “We are really excited to launch this new festival, I have always wanted to set up a festival on the island. As a regular festival goer it became apparent that Kerry needed its own boutique music festival so we decided to make it happen. We want to create an atmosphere where people can relax and get to know each other in a great setting. The local support so far has been amazing and we look forward to working with local businesses in the coming weeks to ensure the festival will bring a boost to the local economy. We are enormously grateful for the support of the South Kerry Development Partnership for making our dream a reality and to Bavaria for coming on board as a sponsor.”

Also speaking at the launch, Ana Mahé, the festival’s event organiser said “We have worked extremely hard over the past number of months to ensure a really high calibre line up for the inaugural festival and we are really excited to have some of the best Irish bands perform. This is an eclectic music and events programme sure to satisfy all tastes and age groups. Valentia Island is a place apart and will provide an amazing backdrop to a completely unique event which will end the 2012 festival season on a high.” David Marshall, the festival’s site manager also spoke of his delight at the launch, saying, “The festival is sure to give a boost to the South Kerry community and is a great opportunity for increasing tourism and showcasing the best it has to offer. The outdoor activities on Valentia are second to none, from canoeing, surfing, kite surfing and much more, it really has so much to offer”.

Early bird tickets for the Valentia Isle Festival go on sale this Wednesday, 20 th June at 9am through the website (www.valentiaislefestival.com). Early bird tickets are priced at just €50 without camping and €60 with.

Visit www.valentiaislefestival.com for further information

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Cover – George Karbus

This issue is packed full of all our usual features along with a great T-Bay feature, Michael Peterson tribute, Indo special and a look into Galway going Volvo.

On the road- We have a look at surfing safety and get an account of when things go wrong.

T-bay- This issue, in our round Ireland tour, we stop off in the sunny south east in the beautiful Tramore Bay.

Gallery- We of course have plenty of glorious images from all out photogs and readers rounding up the past few months!

The Co. Sligo Open is one of the longest running surf comps in the country. This year, with the support of Malin Waters we are celebrating surfing in the Ireland’s north-west with a festival!!

Over this August bank holiday weekend the village will be buzzing with something for everyone, Surf Competitions, Music, Surf Art & Photography, Beach Yoga, Family Events, and our Surfers Market.

The Co. Sligo Open is the fourth competition on the senior tour. Top surfers from all over the country will battle it out for precious tour points to decide national champions. The main sponsors this year are Billabong and Hurley, the competition this will take place on Sat 4th & Sun 5th Aug, click here for more info.

And the Results!

Under 18 bodyboard

1 Cian mc govern

2 Oisin cogan

U18 surf
1 Gearoid mc Daid
2 Jamie Russell
3 Iarom Madden
4 Aaron o Hare

Masters
1 Derek Parle
2 Stevie Burns
3 Simon Cassidy

Seniors
1 Andrew Mennie
2 David O Donnell
3 Colin O Hare
4 Derek Parle

SUP
1 Emmet Doherty
2 Derek Parle
3 Dave Owens
4 Colin Harris
5 Paul Byrne

Ladies Bodyboard
1 Ione Byrne
2 Grace Doyle

Mens Body Board
1 Shane Meehan
2 Andy Kilfeather
3 Seamus Mc Goldrick
4 Aiden Kelly

Longboard
1 Andy Kilfeather
2 Gearoid Mc Daid
3 Stevie Burns
4 Stephen Kelleher

Ladies Open
1 Shauna Ward
2 Allison Drham
3 Ione Byrne
4 Grace Doyle

Mens Open
1 Ronan Ortzen
2 Stephen Kilfeather
3 Aaron Reid
4 Gearoid McDaid

First prize in the open is an AOR surfboard and other prizes include wetsuits, hoodies, leashes, boogie boards, carbon fins, travel-bags, AND MUCH MUCH more!

There will also be a marquee outside Spillane’s bar where surfing, environmental awareness talks and local crafts will be on show!

Brandon_Bay_Surf_Classic_Final_Print

I’m surfing a whole lot longer then I should admit, and it wasn’t long after I started surfing, that I started shaping. It wasn’t out of any huge necessity that I started shaping, I was just so enamoured with the idea of surf boards, that I had to. Think about it, this little craft, this small piece of foam and fibre glass allows you out to ride on waves generated thousands of miles away! I just always thought that was pretty amazing.

If you even look back over the last ten years, its amazing to see how much surfing has changed in our small little country. To people of a certain mindset, Ireland was always up there on the list of surf destinations but to all but a hardy few living here, surfing was something that happened in warmer countries. There certainly wasn’t the interest we get today from the masses, I don’t think I would have believed you ten years ago if you told me that Id see Irish surf being promoted on the television, or that Irish surfers were surfing waves like Teahupo’o and holding their own,or that there would be waves like Teahupo’o found here and surfed!

There has always been one aspect that bothered me though, most surfers today are riding boards that are directly descended from some of those first foam boards from the sixties. Sure, the shapes have been refined (right, REALLY refined), the foams been refined, they’ve lightened up the cloths but the process hasn’t changed. With all the advancements we’ve had in technology in all other aspects of our lives in the last fifty years, surfboards stagnated. What was worse was most people are ok with this.

I have always shaped for my self, since I was fifteen; it already seems like a lifetime ago. I still bought boards from other shapers because I wanted to try as many shapes and designs as I could and I always wanted to ride the best possible board I could. I still shaped all along, just for the love of the boards. Over the years I travelled and I surfed some of the best waves on the planet, and I surfed these waves on some really nice boards, but the amount of times I had to leave two halves of a board behind me, would frighten you. When we first went to Nias, I had three boards with me for a four-month stay. Id snapped the three by the end of the first week (I really honed my skills at putting snapped boards back together on that trip)

I have always strived to make boards that were, stronger, lighter and that would perform better. I have tried countless cloths, foams and woods, some worked, some didn’t and up until the 5th of December 2005, the day Clark foam closed their doors, it was always just a folly for myself and a few friends who’d tried the boards I had been riding myself and were willing to experiment with me. Most boards I had been making for people up until this were just your straight up Clark blanks and glassed with poly resin. After Clark closed, many people panicked, surfers the world over were starting to wonder where they were going to get their next board from, but it drove people to experiment and to be more open to new ideas, probably for the first time since balsa went to foam in the late fifties. This opened the floodgates, everyone was trying the new foams and cloths and resins. Some just tried to recreate the same boards they had with the Clark blanks, and it just didn’t work. Too corky, too light, too skitterish. The list goes on. Others embraced the new technology, learned how it worked and used this to their advantage and the advancements have been astounding.

I have always been trying to progress and to take my boards to the highest level I could. To do this, I had to think outside the surf realms. Your standard surfboard material supplier supply you just that, your standard materials. I’ve spent a lot of time chasing down the technologies used in a few different areas to see could they be applied to surf boards, namely; aviation, racing yaughts and the racing car industry. Now, to try to adapt this to surfboards hasn’t been a walk in the park. There have been many test pieces and test boards and wild goose chases for different cloths that proved to be useless. A complete re imaging of how I glass and finish my boards, but, and this is the important part, I now have boards that are stronger, lighter and perform better then anything I’ve tried to date. (I wont say best that I’m going to make, its just not in me, every day we’re learning and evolving)

Over the last eighteen months to two years, I’ve refined two different constructions. It’s taken me nearly the twenty years, but ideas I started with as a kid, shaping for myself, I’ve been able to make a reality. (my first board was a EPS, perimeter stringer, with wood skins top and bottom, who would have thought it would take me this long to get full circle) Wooden perimeter railed boards and completely stringerless boards. My own personal board is a stringerless 6’3 that Iv now used in everything from a foot of onshore slop in Brandon Bay, to double overhead plus on Anchor point in Morocco and she still goes strong. The stringerless takes a few sessions to get your head around, it does feel very similar to a standard poly board with how it handles itself in the water but you don’t have the corkyness/skitterishness that you would with some of the big name pop outs. Its only after you’ve got a feel for it that you start to realise how much faster it is through turns and the speed that it can generate and how much more lively they feel even through the slop. They take some getting used too, but once you do, I don’t think you can go back.

Then, there’s the perimeter stringer boards with half inch timber running around the perimeter of the board. Nothing has ever felt as solid under my feet. Imagine a bow being drawn and that energy being stored. That’s what its like when you bottom turn on the perimeter stringer boards. On a centre stringier board, the whole board can twist and turn around the centre stringer under pressure and you lose any drive, the perimeter stringer boards just load up and release.

I’ve just always felt we need to move forward, times are a changing, maybe we should be more open to change too.

Al
Supreme overlord, manager, shop boy and janitor at AOR surfboards.
www.aorsurfboards.com

I’m 26 and I know nothing. Some nights I wake up sweaty screaming “Let me out of this ship it is sinking!” I get nervous when the sound of a jet engine changes mid flight and I wish I had discovered surfing at 50.

I wish my first ill fitting wet suit concealed a few extra pints of stout. I want to be the guy who arrives at the beach with a learner board facing the wrong way on his 2011 Ford Mondeo and a blue nylon rope for a leash. The guy locals laugh at, the potential drowning victim. The guy who makes a 3 foot wave look like the worst wipe out since some other famous bad wipe out that I should be able to reference because 50 is a good age to develop a problem.

The 50 year old beginner may never become an average surfer on a world scale. He might never get good at avoiding and then claiming a barrel or bogging a rail and convincing himself that he did a turn but he doesn’t care because he might like surfing more than you do. He will trade in his Mondeo, fit out a van and take to the road every weekend with an array of long boards. He will appreciate the drives and take in every detail of each small town on the way to the beach. Becoming a surfer at 50 is easy. 50 year old surfers develop friendships over cups of coffee, sugared scones and homemade soup in silver thermos flasks. They are content with a day out of the house at their local beach.

I could be wrong, 50 year old surfers could be in the middle of a crisis. They might be standing at the water’s edge, with one porous wet suite boot and a look of fear thinking “What the fuck am I doing with my life? I’m too old for this!!!!!” while their young family are left standing in the car park looking at Dad, as he turns smiles and braves his way into a near drowning situation. Five minutes later he rolls onto the beach, blue nylon leg rope tangled around both legs. His red face covered in dark sand and his leaky boot a distant memory. It’s at that moment he might look at his cold wife, give an ironic smile and think “I wish I discovered surfing when I was younger”. It’s probably a Sunday and on the way home he might think about his bank balance and the excessive amount of Sunday papers he buys and doesn’t read. On the way home he’ll turn to his wife and say “I would have been well able to keep up with them, twenty years ago”.
All I know for sure is that right now I have no money, no measurable achievements and a surfing addiction that is holding me back.

Young surfers connect over class A to C drugs, drunken violence and cold January nights huddled together in an iced car, waiting for a slab of rock and a wave. The young and the foolish poverty bond, we stand on mounds of wet grass half way up the west coast in front of an abandoned cottage throwing shit covered stones at each other like moneys in jackets, hats and gloves while our non-surfing peers take steps to better themselves. We waste hundreds of hours driving from reef to point meeting spotty teenagers in garages who serve us food and spotty teenagers in the next garage who serves us petrol. We encounter old grey men with questionable directions and baffling hair styles while surfers in more consistent destinations wake up have a lookout their bedroom window and give perfect warm waves the thumbs down like drunken emperors. We laugh while saying things like “I no longer give a fuck. Well I do , but , fuck it!” and “This recession is a great excuse to go on the dole”, because surfing lurks in the back of all our minds undermining every possible sensible decision. Surfing is a good excuse to turn away from the flame and it’s this blind pursuit of pleasure that creates an internal monster that hinders our development. 50 seem like a comfortable age, people seem to be mature enough to deal with that monster.

I like to picture surfing’s internal monster as a strong black American woman. She is 60, about 18 stone and she wears floral dresses. She attends mass on a regular basis and has never been to Ireland. When she thinks about Ireland, she thinks of Leprechauns and American cleaning products. If you pushed her for more information she would stare you down, make a “tut tut” sound with her pursed lips and point at the door. She can lift heavy items; her hair is straight and polished.

Human A; “Should I take that job?”
Surfing’s internal monster; “No, now get back in the water”
Human A; “But what about that job…”
Surfing’s internal monster; “Zip it!!There is a 60% chance that the wind will swing offshore for an hour, 300 miles from here. Get back in that car.”
Human A; “But it’s cold and early and I have had four hours of sleep and.”
Surfing’s internal monster; “Are you really a surfer?”
Human A; “Yes I’m really a surfer.”
Human B on the phone; “Come on, we are heading up north, are you up for it?”
Human A; “It’s a long way to go and its not looking great?”
Surfing’s internal monster; “You have nothing else to do!”
Human A; “Yea sure I will see you at 3 tomorrow morning.”

In Nigeria they believe in Mami Wata a mermaid-like figure, with a woman’s upper body and the hindquarters of a fish or serpent. Mami Wata is a spirit that abducts her followers when they are swimming. She then brings them to her paradisiacal realm. Should she allow them to leave, the travellers usually return with a new spiritual understanding reflected in their gaze. These returnees often become more easygoing after the encounter.

Surfing is great it has given me my best friends, amazing visual memories and the opportunity to meet genuinely interesting people. Wild sea dogs who have been captured by Mami Wata, I’m not talking about people who “charge big waves” and give cold shoulders. I’m talking about ego free, interesting people who have lead undocumented turbulent lives. These characters wouldn’t have been formed without surfing. Their laughter lines etched by sun, fun and tragedy would be replaced by the smooth bald head of suburbia. Or were these mad bastards predestined for lives of mayhem? Were they water babies destined for darkness and fun?

Ideally surfing would be a luxury for us all, a take it or leave it situation like the passing music of a street busker. But it’s not. Surfing has rearranged our minds. I’m addicted and so are you. That is the first step, realising that you have a problem. The second step is dealing with that problem. I can tell you how but you have to agree to pay ten per cent of all your future earnings and two percent of you first born child’s confirmation money into my Nigerian bank account. In reality none of this matters because I get nervous when the frequency on a jet engine changes, I think the world’s final image will be of lava raining on palm trees and I wish I discovered surfing when I was 50.

In a break in the storm that brought the largest wave ever recorded in Irish waters (20m!!!) our resident mad men got out amongst it. Some amazing surfing both tow-in and some real ballzy paddle-in. Check this vid from Peter Clyne for a taste of the action.

Mullaghmore Tow Session from Peter Clyne on Vimeo.

He was towing with Andrew Cotton (from UK) and (from Ireland) at Praia do Norte, when the bomb came in. Al was in the channel and describes the moment. “Everything seemed to be perfect, the weather, the waves. Both Cotty and I rode two big ones in the 60 ft plus range and then, when Garrett got on the rope a wave, maybe 30 feet. bigger came out of the canyon, it was meant to be. I had the best seat in the house as I was doing water safety on the ski as he dropped down the face of the biggest wave I’ve ever seen. It was incredible. Most people would look scared but Garrett looked in control as he went down the most critical part of the wave. It was an inspirational ride by an inspirational surfer. After the ride it was as if the sea calmed down. We sat out there and just absorbed both what had just happened and the surroundings. What a day!”

The three were surfing in Praia do Norte off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, McNamara has been spending quite some time here once he discovered the magic of the spot. The coast of Nazaré is home to one of the only deep water canyons that runs all the way to shore. He has been working with the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute to understand how the waves reach such an abnormal height.

According to the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute, “the proximity of the ‘Nazaré Canyon’ to Praia do Norte creates a situation that greatly increases the swells intensity. The conditions of the swell and wind direction observed on this day exemplify this phenomenon”. “By (9:00 AM), the monitor on the buoys registered a swell with around 8 m near Nazaré. With a WNW swell direction with favorable wind, it is reasonable to conclude that this wave had a significant swelling effect which is characteristic of this place”

“I feel so blessed and honored to have been invited to explore this canyon and its special tow. The waves here are such a mystery”, says Garrett.

ZON North Canyon Show 2011

Garrett McNamara is back in Portugal to embark on another mission exploring the waves of Nazaré, in the ZON North Canyon Show 2011. This is the second mission of a three years project, initiated last year. This is a Nazaré City Hall and ZON project to internationally promote the region as a destination for surfing, show casing the unique aspects of the “Nazaré Canyon”.

The “Nazaré Canyon” is a rare geographical phenomenon, the biggest in Europe and one of the largest in the world, which can be explained as a gap on the continental plate with 170 kilometers of length and 5 kilometers of depth. The “Nazaré Canyon”, that is located right in front of Praia do Norte, receives the swells from the Atlantic Ocean and creates waves with abnormal size, compared to the rest of the Portuguese coast.