Looking for the breaks as surfers chase the waves

"Fan-tas-tique."

Across the building site, where Jack Phillips' Fishing Tackle used to run a vital trade in penny hooks and Mepps trout lures, a group of French surfers take in, for the first time, a sweep of Atlantic Ocean that generates the best surfing waves in Europe.

"Fan-tas-tique." There is no disent.

From ground level at Bundoran's "wee boat quay" further down the main street Pat Duffy used to haul his boat on wooden rollers into the water and fearlessly rev his outboard motor towards the headland and his lobster creels. In children's eyes Duffy was heroic. Alone, standing upright in a boat that lurched and vanished in the trough of the swell from Rougey Point to The Lions Paw, Duffy, with his jumper rolled to the elbows, bore the brunt of changing weather and wicked currents. Thing was, and everyone knew it, the Donegal fisherman couldn't swim.

At the cliff-head, orange buoys mark the nets and pots of the traditional fishing grounds, but the French group are looking beyond them at the feeding frenzy taking place. Their gaze follows the contour of the waves like a horse trainer eyeing the conformation of a yearling. They look out to where a geological contrivance of a limestone shelf turns a calm ocean surface into thundering breakers which roll onto rocks either side of the peak. An endless supply of genuine six foot Atlantic waves. This is the "Fan-tas-tique." In the treacherous sea over two dozen surfers loiter around like a colony of bobbing seals making a mockery of Duffy's ancient valour, crushing the child vision of the fisherman-warrior.

Not content with harnessing the waves, the surfers sometimes use the rip currents, which have in the past dragged people to their death, as a quaint means of public transport from beach to ocean. The current saves them paddling.

"I've seen them in competition," says Irish surfer Roci Allan.

"When they reach the beach and they've a limited amount of time to complete their runs, they drop the board and another team member picks it up for them. Then they race down the beach to the rip so that they don't have to paddle as hard to get out again. I've seen surfers dragged onto land after a competition-they're so exhausted."

This week and last week the best surfers in Europe have picked their way over the seaweed and rocks, paddled their way out through the surf, past the creels and have fought like cats for the best positions as the rollers move in.

"Injuries?", says Irish coach Peter Cook. "Everyone gets injured.

It's a very extreme sport. A lot of people die surfing. That's just a reality. In Hawaii two or three die every year. But the great thing about surfing is that it teaches you to adapt to something which is much stronger than you. You realise quickly that the elements are much stronger than you will ever be, so you adapt.

It's a dangerous sport. Anyone who says it's not is a fool. But it's like anything, it's education. You know the risks but they are calculated."

In the Olympic Amusements on the main street Denis Porter's generosity used to have him stand in the arcade with a stone and a half of 2p coins cradled in the belly of his pullover. Great handfuls of coin fed the innocent slot machine vice of Belfast kids on holiday. A proprietors whimsical benevolence but he knew the money would go back into the great jackpot hunt. A calculated risk. But no child was ever seen rushing out the door with the money to buy a Peggy's Leg.

Porter, like Duffy, was a man of the town. He would likely have viewed the surfers as wild eccentrics to be categorised in with the odd West Brit blow-in or German nudist who occasionally brightened up the days. It was never a Bundoran thing.

Tour buses and American visitors with their names stuck to their lapels rolling into the Catering Capital of the north-west. Golf at the Great Northern, fishing the Bundrowes or up at Melvin and most recently Brian McEniff's glory years culminating in the 1992 All-Ireland football championship. The expanse of sporting interests was easily measured around the town. Where was Ireland then in the surfing bible, The Storm Riders Guide? But the surfers have arrived in numbers and they stroll down the West End of the town stripped to the waist, eyeing the sea and affecting an effortless superiority. In recent years the locals have begun to look on them as part of a more regular if transient picture, a colourful, peaceful crowd.

"They do no one any harm. Sure how could they out there," said a local taking the time to squint out over the rock pools.

Sixteen countries square up for the European Championships which start tomorrow and runs until next Saturday. With each team comprising 22 people, around 5,000 bednights should extend the season for at least a handful of the tourist town's hostels.

The Irish squad of 17, led by Cook, a French-based Australian who in the past competed in professional surfing events, hope to add to Ireland's current medal haul of one gold, two silver and three bronze over the years since Irish teams first started competing in 1969.

Currently ranked sixth in Europe, Ireland previously hosted the event in Lahinch in 1972 and Rossnowlagh in 1985. Such a standing in Europe is due to a combination of organisational expertise in the association and the quality of the waves. Fishing hazards have become a surfing natural resource.

"You have to have a profound knowledge of the playing field because it is always in evolution. There are never two waves the same, even out here where it is quite mechanical," says Cook pointing out to the peak. "Currents, wind . . . it's always moving. Unlike something like tennis where you know there is a square court and a net, you are always adapting your style of play to the wave. "To be a good competition surfer you have to be able to adapt, to be able to position yourself in the ocean in relation to where the wave is breaking and after that, be around 5ft 9ins and 70 kilos. Most of the top 44 professional surfers in the world would be in or around around those sort of dimensions-short people, short legs, big wide arse."

For the coming week, when the competition approaches the weekend finals, Bundoran is hoping for enough ferocity out at sea to send a conveyor belt of aquatic turbulence into Donegal Bay - but without the clouds arriving in tandem.

"What we like to see is a low pressure out in the Atlantic and high pressure over Ireland. Hurricane Erika - we wouldn't mind it going right up the Atlantic but not head on," says Brian Britton, the Irish Surfing Association president.

To win the championships, four surfers will go out at any one given time to scrap for the best waves. Depending on conditions they have around 20 minutes and in the final will ride up to 15 waves in that time period. Five judges will mark every wave they take with the best scores counting at the end.

The judges try to be objective and mark the path of the board on the wave and not the flamboyance of the surfer. They score highest for "the surfer who commits the most radical and powerful manoeuvre on the most critical part of the biggest and best wave."

Just prior to where the blue wall of water breaks and turns to a white froth is the critical part of the wave, the point of most energy, where the surfer tries to become "radical."

"The way they move on a board is very short, very powerful, extreme muscle contraction. I saw hurling the other day. The movement in hurling reminded me a little of what surfers do - shoulders rotating, hips blocking. Bending, twisting and rotating different parts of the body at the same time," says Cook.

The French have swaggered in as champions with the Portuguese not to far behind and Cook is optimistically aiming for a top four finish for Ireland although the camp have already been hit with problems. Two team members Richard Fitzgerald and Jimmy Meehan, both from Bundoran, are in doubt.

Fitzgerald picked up an intestinal problem and found himself in Sligo hospital while Meehan injured his knee in a fall. Still, Cook, who overall has a young squad, will look to people like Rossnowlagh's Tania Ward and Zoe Lally, the perennial Irish champion, with Joe McNulty from Capistrani, USA, and senior Andrew Hill from Portrush all hopeful medallists.

"Each country has their own surf culture. In Ireland it's like what I call the wild man and the sea - extreme environmental conditions - and it fits in quite nicely with the pub and music scene. In Australia there is a beach culture that exists every day. You look at some people and say `Jeez they don't surf'. It's much more aggressive," says Cook.

"You can see the attitude out in the water where they try and dominate things and where the Irish are a bit more harmonious with the conditions. I feel you have to be arrogant to be a good sportsman."

Ireland will be looking for the World Championships next.

Huntington Beach, California, where it was last held is the spiritual home of "drop out" American surfing and a town like Bundoran certainly won't match it for it's ample vacuity or climate. But the wee town, this week, is on it's best behaviour and can offer other aspects to a sport that cannot be defined by competition alone.

Surfing is sitting comfortably with the slot machines and GAA. It has transformed the waves off the peak into a jacuzzi and the rip currents along Rougey Beach have become a therapeutic spa. Radical. Fan-tas-tique.