We present an extract from Cold-Water Eden, the new memoir by Richie Fitzgerald.
Born and raised in Bundoran, Richie was Ireland's first pro-surfer, putting the country on the map as a world-class destination for pros and soul surfers alike. Here he shares his unique perspective as an Irish surfer, from the halcyon days of exploring Ireland in search of untouched waves, to being the first European invited to the world’s most prestigious big-wave event in Hawaii.
After spending much of the summer of 1983 being a beach rat with my brother and sisters, it would be November before Frances and Joe convinced me to come down and give a surfboard a go. Nothing like waiting for winter's piercing chill as the tonic to try the sport of Hawaiian kings. All was set for the following weekend. Saturday morning was the time and Tullan Strand was the place for my initiation. There was an unbridled innocence and lack of knowledge to our early surfing. We hit the waves with little fanfare and no self-consciousness or awareness of the self-effort and pioneering spirit of it all.
On the day of my inaugural surf, between myself, Frances and Joe we had two wetsuits to accompany the one surfboard we owned and the use of another surfboard from Bundoran’s first generation of itinerant communal surfboards. Both of our wetsuits were two-piece contraptions with dungarees underneath and a neoprene anorak on top. Two into three doesn’t go, so that November day my brother wore the dungarees of his wetsuit with a jumper underneath and a normal everyday cheap zip jacket covering his top half. I wore the other half that was the jacket part of the wetsuit, which was way too big for my nine-year-old frame by about two sizes. I would have worn an extra small if such a size existed then. The upper part of the wetsuit that was rolled around me was an adult medium. The jacket had a full-length opening metal zip straight up the chest to the base of your neck. With a texture of thick, dry shipping carboard, its lack of flexibility was compounded by skin-nipping mini-zips on the cuffs to help with application and removal. One of the peculiarities of the day for me was even though the wetsuit could have fitted two of me in it, such was its size, the harsh material still made it a tight struggle to get into.
The top was made of restrictive neoprene that offered little warmth in its construction, which was exacerbated by its ill-fitting. Both pieces of wetsuit were made with fabrics vaguely more malleable than Houdini’s buckled straitjacket. The wetsuit’s material triggered an instant and agonising skin rash as soon as you moved in it, as if it were lined with 60-grit sandpaper. Hauling that wetsuit on, I blurted out a few curse words. It was the first time that I got away with bold language that wasn’t immediately extinguished by my sister with a well-executed dressing down.
With only half a wetsuit at my disposal, I was destined for failure. To cover the rest of my body, I used a pair of jeans with tightly tied tracksuit bottoms pulled over the top of them. On my feet were two sets of fluffy white sports socks and a pair of old Dunnes Stores 'Sizzler’ blue-and-white runners as a homemade substitute for wetsuit booties. For our hands, we all used thin, woollen, navy school gloves under a pair of yellow Marigold kitchen gloves. We would secure the Marigold gloves just behind the wrist bone to make them as watertight as we could, using a few layers of grey carpet tape, while always being very careful not to get any of the tape on our arms, as it took pelt and skin off with it when you had to remove it from exposed parts of the body. The taping made the Marigold gloves a single-use item, so we bought them by the pack. If we were caught short, Mum always had a stash underneath the kitchen sink beside the thick Jif scouring cream. The rubbery, chalky smell of those gloves reminds me of early surfs much more than any washing of dishes or peeling vegetables I may have ducked out of doing.
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Listen: Richie Fitzgerald talks to Ray D'Arcy
You lose most of your heat through your head, making it crucial to have some headgear. The only thing available to us was cheap latex swimming pool caps. We would have used the more expensive and comfortable silicon caps if they were available.
The three of us really were quite the apparition as we walked down the beach in a sorry procession of wretched bits of wetsuit and poxy hulks of surfboard. Everything about our early surfing days, from the waves we surfed to equipment we did or didn’t possess, was shaped by circumstance rather than design. We continued marching forward, blissfully light on the practical but heavy on enthusiasm for the surf that day and many more thereafter. We didn’t care for aesthetics. Anyway, no one was watching because almost nobody surfed Tullan Strand in the 1980s except for the occasional sinking-sand-evading opportunist. The craft for my maiden voyage was the notorious by reputation but euphemistically named surfboard known locally as the blue canoe. It was one of a hat-trick of surfboards in town that never had an outright owner; instead, the boards were passed around from perspective surfer to another as necessity demanded. It was a horrible lump of a surfboard the size of a canoe, hence the name.
Already quivering with the cold and feeling more than a bit incongruous wearing my neoprene shackles, I lumbered towards the sea. My brother held my hand in a sticky Marigold-on-Marigold embrace. His grip helped me get out past the first line of white water with the listing Bismarck attached to my left ankle. He swapped over with my sister to try to get me to a favourable depth and position for a wave. The cold shock to my body was immediate and all-consuming, the 10-degree water surging into my runners, tracksuit, jeans and baggy top before I got to waist depth, forcing me to take rapid, shallow, panicked breaths through my mouth.
I had never worn a wetsuit before, even though this one was only 50 per cent of the real deal. Being so confined and wrapped up in neoprene, latex and waterlogged clothing contrived to make me feel the absurdity of claustrophobia in the expansive openness of my surroundings. I was good in the water, but this was a much too restrictive activity for me. I hated the burden of the surfboard attached to my ankle and the tonnage of my make-do baggy wetsuit with its bulges full of water. Before the first five minutes had expired, my surfing inclinations dwindled rapidly in my rotten before it’s ripe reasoning.
My brother heaved me into my first wave, where I instantly lurched uncontrollably forward and down, as if the front of the surfboard had just suffered a catastrophic double flat tyre at speed. The next wave offered little more, as I was blown off the board on impact, landmine style.
I did manage to catch a few successful waves that first day, so all was not lost. When I say ‘catch’, I use that term liberally. It was more my brother or sister who had manoeuvred me onto five or six waves. I stood up eventually on my last one in that briefest of first surf encounters. Just for a moment, I felt the sensation of gliding over the surface of a wave. But then my fleeting excitement ended abruptly as I was projected head over arse again off the front of the board in a combination of loss of balance and front-overloaded weight distribution. That was it, my 20 minutes in the water were up. So that was my surf initiation: trying to get a handle on a porous board that was hellbent on sinking itself with my ankle umbilically attached. This combination of shock, cold, tears, snots and a small stream of blood from the surfboard’s impact brought the curtain down on my ignominious first surf. I told my brother I hated it, and swore at him and to God that I was never doing it again. My brother carried me most of the way back up the beach like a mini shipwrecked sailor in soaked-through Dunnes Stores finery.
(Pic: Aaron Pierce)
A few hours later, I had warmed up enough at home to think straight. There was something about the feeling of sailing on a moving wedge of water that’s other-worldly. I just couldn’t shake it. I found my sister upstairs and said, ‘Hey Frankie, is it OK if I come surfing with you again next weekend?’ to which she replied, ‘I knew you’d enjoy it.’
Within a month, by the end of December, after three or four more surfs I was completely hooked. All I wanted to do and all I could think about from that point on was catching waves. There is something in the addiction to surfing that’s hard to quantify or explain to those who haven’t experienced it. For many that first taste of walking on water changes your DNA. I’ve tried most sports – especially board sports like snowboarding and water-skiing, both from the same stable as surfing – but surfing has a uniqueness that sets it apart. If I allow myself to become all free-spirited about it, then the answer is simple. The playing field changes moment by moment where you have to decode and learn on the fly. It’s a quality in surfing that can’t be offered in a stadium, racetrack or something more similar, like a ski slope or skate bowl. Surfing is just wildly different to anything else, and that’s the hook: the fact that the wave you are surfing has travelled thousands of miles across the ocean from some distant storm system while breaking only once. That wave gives you an exclusive experience, be it 5 feet or 50 feet.
Cold-Water Eden is published by HarperCollins Ireland
