By Jim Moores
“It was Moby Dick that dismantled me... For forever and a day I shall chase that white whale”.
- Captain Ahab
Some years ago–having little money in my pocket and being between jobs to occupy me on land, I set off from home to surf an unfamiliar coast: Western Ireland. And now, whenever I find myself falling into a rut, whenever the colour of my soul is a dreary grey, I remember that time.
There is a cut-through I walk up on my lunch breaks in St Agnes. An overgrown buddleia erupts from the Cornish wall and engulfs the narrow lane in a leafy green tunnel, the shape of a barrelling wave. Each time I pass through it, for a moment I imagine flying along that Irish wave, setting a rail and looking down the line. I do my best to bring those piercing memories back into focus, now vague with the passage of time and too much reality-obscuring reflection, like glare from a mirror. That moment I chased, and managed to experience for barely an instant, now seems as far from my grasp as it did before I set out to find it. And so almost daily I set out to find it again.
#
Ireland. No prior planning, just a scratchy hand written list bearing the names of a few places we’d heard about. No research, no understanding of local conditions, but high expectations for the cold water paradise built up in our minds.
Our goal was not to find unsurfed breaks or to fathom new, unfelt depths. We knew we walked a well-trodden path, with no pretence of originality. We just wanted to score some peaty autumn waves that we could lock away and treasure long after we got home.
#
The landscape should be a character in a story such as this. But it’s impossible to distil the beauty and awe of a place like the west Irish coast down to a few words when blinkered by the surf. It was, however, hard not to notice the table top mountains, forged by ancient giant forces (whether mythical, or geological), the abundance of verdant green, and the heavy sea mist that hugs the shoreline from dawn to dusk with only a brief midday intermission. It was not a common place, that’s for sure.
Our poorly organised odyssey took us to the barren cark park of Easkey left. In the shadow of the remains of the ancient O’Dowd castle, a grey September sky hung over everything, intermittently dropping rain into the gusting cross shore wind.
One other car parked up. In it, an elderly couple huddled together, sheltering from the elements. The sea was gun metal grey, with blue and white streaks left by the waves coming through. We had been driving around headlands and down narrow lanes the night before to scope out the wave we were yearning for. We needed to know how to get to it. The night was clear enough to see the path down to the beach but we couldn't see the surf. Then, everything was blowing sideways in the storm, and it felt raw.
Walking by the ruined castle, it radiated an eerie sense of foreboding. The waves these stones must have seen over hundreds of years. The stories they could tell, the warnings they could give. The tricolour flutted wildly above the ruined tower, the orange section ominously eaten up by the wind.
We took in a hellish looking sea. Neither of us were confident that we should go out. But with nothing else to say, we got out the car for a closer look. Thick lines of white water mashed through the line up, succeeded by dark blue heaving sections of Atlantic power that rear up in oversized, perfect A-frames. We stood for several minutes and eventually noticed two dots. One seemed to be surfing a wave every now and then, the other more cautiously hugging the shoulder and not risking the tumult of the pocket. Long, unwinding walls, burnished by the howling wind, looked as though they were hewn out of stone. I asked James why they weren’t catching more waves. Although somewhat buoyed from the scouting mission, we didn’t hurry to get in.
Suits on, boards under arms. I opted for my heavy 7’2” single fin, a massive wide nose and narrow swallow tail. Like something you would see under Gerry Lopez in a timeless pipeline keg, and the closest thing I had to a big wave board.
Not having researched the entry and exit, we had no example to follow. Weighing up the options, we could either: scramble down the bluff, hobble over the rocky shore line and bash through the whitewater; or, go the long way around – out off the end of the harbour wall, through the channel, and paddle round to the left. The latter seemed the only feasible option. Stepping foot on the surface of the wall signals the point of no return. Neither of us could give into fear then without losing face. We hadn't noticed that the two surfers in the line up had moved, until they scrambled up the rusted ladder fixed into the wall just ahead of us.
A sense of relief came over me, that it was possible to surf here and get out in one piece. Surely they would have some friendly pearls of wisdom for us, some local knowledge, something to ease the nerves. Their brief “alrights’” gave away Aussie accents, but nothing else. We didn’t register their breathlessness, their vacant thousand-yard stares.
After half an hour of paddling, shoulders aching, the adrenaline had kicked in from seeing waves crash into the flats like falling buildings. Double over head, or thereabouts, and ferocious. Not like a dangerous inanimate object that you can judge and anticipate; these waves had the killer instinct of a wild animal. Each one, monstrous like the white whale that tormented Captain Ahab, occupied his mind and body, before dragging him to a watery end. The feeling that I should not have been there intensified. James, on the other hand, was apparently unphased, paddling ahead of me.
I stopped to yell, pointing to a cavernous pit as it clamped its jaws shut. “Did you see that?!?!”. Without stopping, James shouted back to me: “yeah”. Not giving anything away.
Sitting on the shoulder, after a long journey with surf as the destination, then was not the time to avoid waves. It’s at that point I joined the dance all surfers that venture to the edge of their comfort zone know. Sooner or later, we would need to catch a wave, either for our own sense of achievement or simply to get back to land. We started to get closer and closer into what we thought was going to be the take-off zone. A rideable wave came through. It rose up inexorably and broke in terrifying slow motion. We watched it rumble down the line for hundreds of yards. I wished I had caught it, but I was relieved I didn’t.
I sat for an age until a second wave came from the deeps. James was further out, and the approaching mountain of water had separated us. He’d paddled over it and was now on the safer side. It was at a slightly softer angle to the shore than its predecessor, and looked more surfable, the take-off more approachable. I dug my left hand in to change direction, and I did my best to heave handfuls of the unforgiving sea behind me. Pulled along by the power of the wave for a few seconds, I popped up and slid down the hill. I couldn’t see, or sense at all, where the bottom of the wave would be. It continued to drop out as the top kept rising, an immaculate wall of water stretched out before me, cleaner than anything I could remember or imagine. One bottom turn lasting for what felt like minutes drove me along. I shot into the safety of the channel and couldn’t quite process how good or how big that wave was.
On the next wave, my board wouldn’t follow the line of the wave before. It bogged for a split second which caused me to slow, and move fractionally up the face. I looked down at my feet as the board shifted, I slipped out of position and as I tried to will my front foot back into the right spot, my back foot slipped right off and into the water. The board, thick and buoyant, flew upward with the curl and whacked me broadside on the head, from forehead to chin.
In free fall, I accepted my fate and tried to relax. I hadn’t lost consciousness, so everything was fine. Me and my board made contact again mid-air, but it had spun around. The fin cracked the outside of my right foot just as I hit the water. The agony was unbearable, a white hot flash that took over my whole body. I felt heavy, as though the pain dragged me down further.
I was down so long that breath seemed more like a memory than a reflex. Far off in the distance, in all directions, I heard bone clashing with bone; methodically, clicking in time with the energy of the sea. I imagined it was the boulders that I decided not to scramble over, rocking over the reef, rhythmically teetering back and forth. Myths of giants competing to tear huge chunks of rock from the land and throw them into the sea struck me as a possible reality.
I emerged, ears ringing from the beating, right leg dead and completely useless, vision slightly blurred. I couldn’t tell whether I was in any real danger, or not. I could have been, but James’ calm demeanor made my pain and shock seem foolish by comparison. To gather my nerves, I spent a long time paddling around and over waves, trying to regain some of the composure lost to my environment.
Eventually the light began to fade and the quality of the waves dipped, so we retraced our route back to the harbour. As we paddled into the lee of the wall, a palpable relief hit me.
Careful not to ding my board on the rusting ladder, James up ahead of me, my feet were again on the surface of the harbour wall. After getting up the ladder, I stopped for a moment. Maybe to take in what had happened, I’m not sure. The walk-way was slick from the smoothing effects of endless waves and standing puddles, so each step was carefully considered.
I turned and looked at the sea, and felt as though I may have conquered something. As I did, a wide swinging wave surged over the wall. A heaving watery bulldozer was heading my way and I was powerless. Instinctively I braced, and held my board horizontally across my knees, expecting the worst. The rush of heavy water came up to my shoulder, but retreated, leaving me standing.
It occurred to me that this was the first time I was actively trying to get away from the sea. Enjoyment was replaced by fear, and I was pitted against something I hold sacred and central to my own identity. A brutal punishment for thinking I could take the sea on and win.
#
Memory is an imperfect tool at the best of times. My ability to remember exactly how I felt wanes with every day that passes. I am not sure if I felt more fear than exhilaration, or whether my adrenaline surpassed everything else. Perhaps the waves were smaller than I remember. I can never really know.
But I am sure of one thing - that wave became my own personal white whale. To surf well in heavy conditions, to prove to myself that I can, an obsession that stalks me every time the swell jumps in size. From the shore on those wintry days, when there are strong waves and roaring winds, I am filled by an incompressible mix of intent, and apprehension, adventure and inaction.
Like Ahab, the whale took a part of me with it back to the depths. The reckless and certain part, the thought that I could surf any wave the ocean could throw at me, is what I search for now in these imaginary moments in the buddleia.
Jim Moores is a Cornish writer with an obsession for the sea that surrounds his home. His work can be found in the pages and online archives of international surf magazines (Carve, The Surfers Path, Longboarding magazine) and independent publications (Daughters of the Sea, Real Surf Magazine). He’s part of the dedicated team behind Local Mag, a Cornish surf, art and lifestyle journal telling the stories of the locals and their surroundings. He works in an office in an old fishing village and surfs more than he should.
