To my regret I couldn't make it to the Dublin premiere of Wave Riders last Friday. But Alf Alderson was there and caught the film. Here's his review.
Dublin – they say it’s a fair city and I wouldn’t be one to disagree after an excellent weekend in the metropolis’s eclectic Trinity Capital Hotel, which I highly recommend. But, you may be asking yourself, what has this got to do with the fine sport of surfing? Well, I was there to see the world premiere of Wave Riders, a new documentary airing last Friday evening at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. So now it all falls into place…
Indeed, the fact that such a remark would nowadays raise few eyebrows is a natural follow on from the subject of Wave Riders, which, in a nutshell, looks at the development of surfing in Ireland from its somewhat arcane Hawaiian roots to becoming the new epicentre for big wave surfing. Those of you who know your surf history may know much of what Wave Riders has to tell the viewer, starting with the story of Hawaiian/Irish George Freeth, an outstanding waterman of the early 20th century who introduced surfing to the American public and thence to the rest of the world.
This Irish-Hawaiian connection is the fine filament which holds the
film together, and takes the movie from these early days in surf
history to the golden days of surf exploration in the 70s, when Kevin
Naughton, another surfer with Irish roots, travelled the globe with
Michael Peterson. The duo sent words and pictures of their adventures back to
Surfer magazine and spawned a surf travel virus that is still in the
bloodstream of surfing today.
Interspersed with the story and interviews with various fascinating
characters (including Naughton) are some superb action sequences in
Northern Ireland, Donegal, Sligo and County Clare featuring Kelly Slater
on his first trip to Ireland and tow partners Richie Fitzgerald and
Gabe Davies, who explain to the ‘unjazzed’ what the whole Irish surf
phenomena is about. Let’s just say if you’ve surfed there you’ll relate
totally to what the boys are saying; if you haven’t then you owe it to
yourself to go and find out what they’re on about.
The point at which Wave Riders really grabbed my attention, however, is when Kevin Naughton, surf writer Drew Campion and others hit upon the fact that it took the surfing world until the 90s to really realise that there was world class surf in Ireland. Naughton tells how he returned to the land of his ancestors in the 70s and 80s after pioneering surf adventures around the globe and was blown away by the cold water surf Nirvana he discovered; in the late 90s the Malloy brothers venture back to the land of their grandmother and make the same discovery for themselves; and even Slater is captivated by the waves, the people and the landscapes of Ireland.
Meanwhile a small but slowly growing band of local surfers were taking to the waves - among them Fitzgerald and Davies - and realising that not only does Ireland have world class surf, it also has some of the world’s biggest surf. You can probably guess where things are going from here, not that this makes Wave Riders any less interesting to the viewer.
Richie and Gabe are seen along with the Malloys and John McCarthy describing the discovery and taking on of Aileens, with Keith Malloy prophetically remarking afterwards that “One year the biggest wave in the world will be ridden in Ireland…”.
And here’s where true life becomes more fanciful than the movies. I spoke to Gabe after the movie about the final sequence, which is, of course, Mullaghmore Head on 1 December last year, when he, Richie, Al Mennie and Duncan Scott rode the 50ft monsters thundering in from the Atlantic. “It was the last possible day of shooting, the conditions came together just right and with three hours to go we got the sequences,” said Gabe. This after over two years of filming. Uncanny.
And those final sequences at Mullaghmore are visceral in their power – if they don’t send a shiver down your spine then you can’t call yourself a real surfer. Cold, monochrome, fearsome and unrelenting waves thrash out their lives against the Sligo coastline and are ridden by a handful of guys who can realistically and justifiably claim a direct connection as far back as Freeth and even the origin of surfing in Hawaii.
There have been heated debates on these pages about the quality of surf in the British Isles compared to the rest of the world, but watch Wave Riders and I defy anyone anywhere who is not scared of donning a wetsuit to tell me that Ireland at least doesn’t have some of the best waves in the world – hell, even Slater says so. And Wave Riders shows you so.
It also shows you that surfing in the 21st century is as much Irish as it is Hawaiian – indeed the future may be more Irish than Hawaiian – and that we’re lucky, because although we’re not all born Irish (or Hawaiian) we do all have Ireland’s waves within relatively easy reach.
So, watch Wave Riders when it does the rounds, be inspired then book the
ferry or get on a plane to Ireland. Because believe me, you’ll want to after seeing the
surf sequences. The music is pretty good, too.
Wave Riders is next showing at the Belfast Film Festival on 13th April. All pictures courtesy the film-makers, Inis Films.
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