Leaps of faith

ADVENTURE SPORTS:What do you do if you have a fear of heights, can't swim and your driving is rivalled only by the little old lady from Pasadena? Well, if you're CONOR POPE, you take your courage in your hands and jump into a 24-hour whirlwind of terrifying adventure sports

WAS TOLD I WOULD die on April 11th. Admittedly, the source of this grim news was an unreliably drunk Ouija board fashioned out of a scrabble set and shot glass in a Galway student house in the early 1990s, but right now I’m pretty certain it was right on the money.

It’s April 11th and I’m standing on a platform the size of an A4 notepad more than 10 metres off the ground in a damp Wicklow field. The platform is wobbling violently and making me do a passable if unwitting imitation of a shaking-all-over Elvis, only with less singing and smiling and more terrified facial contortions and girlish whimpers.

If I survive this ordeal, I will go directly to a bridge nearby from whence I must fall backwards into space before driving to Monaghan to try to break one of the weirdest world records in a trench filled with freezing water. From there it’s on to Donegal to throw myself into a raging ocean before driving at high speed across Bundoran’s sands in a flimsy contraption that is entirely new to both the town and to me.

In hindsight, committing to doing five terrifying adventure sports I’d never done before in 24 hours may have been a mistake. I hate heights, can’t swim and drive like an 80-year-old granny. And it is my death-day.

The Kippure Estate is a small adventure park near the Sally Gap. It has giant climbing frames, zip lines, an abseiling wall and simulated rock climbing. While none of these are for the faint hearted, compared to the centre’s Leap of Faith and Monster Swing, they are child’s play.

To take the Leap of Faith you have to climb a telegraph pole, stand on a minuscule platform, jump in the air and try to grab a trapeze swing some two metres away. Now, two metres may not sound far when at ground level, but when you are this high up and blowing in the wind, it’s a different story. It is considered by most visitors to be its most terrifying apparatus and has brought grown men to their knees – literally.

Kippure is popular with stag and hen parties, families and companies looking for team-building exercises, and has also become a hit among inter-county GAA teams who use it to bond. One senior hurler – we’ll spare his blushes by keeping his county secret – climbed to the top, took a look down and spent 10 long minutes kneeling there, afraid to jump. Initially his teammates were supportive but eventually grew bored and started booing. It’s probably safe to say he felt less than fully bonded by the end of his ordeal.

It is not any real danger, but the perception of which, that causes problems. Safety is paramount: harnesses are checked and rechecked and it is impossible to imagine how anyone could come to harm on any of the climbing frames and vertiginous platforms – but try telling your brain that when it’s pretty sure you’re about to kill it through your stupidity.

For terror, Kippure’s Monster Swing runs the Leap close. It’s a simple device. You climb on to a high bridge, strap on a harness, lean over the edge and watch, ashen-faced, as an instructor removes the harness. Then you fall for about two seconds – it feels like a lot longer – before a second rope catches you and swings you slowly to safety. I was too scared to scream.

Bog snorkelling may not be not scary – but it is cold, wet, filthy, befuddling and utterly ridiculous. It’s also a nice thing to do once, if only so it can be crossed of the list of things I will never have to do again. The centre of Irish bog snorkelling is Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, where the national championships take place every September. Last year there were over 70 participants, and in 2011 the organisers hope to convince more than 100 hardy and/or demented souls to take the challenge. And just what is the challenge? You swim 60 metres through a channel of bog water with your head immersed in the murk at all times using only flippered feet to propel yourself. The record is one minute and 20 seconds or thereabouts. After about five minutes, they turn off the stopwatch. It turns out that losing a snorkel midway through and swimming in a zig-zag fashion, repeatedly banging your blue-with-the-cold head against the trench walls, is not the best way to break the record. Who knew?

From boggy Monaghan it’s on to beachy Bundoran. It hosts the European Surfing Championships this autumn; one look over the bay on a blustery spring morning and you can see why. The waves are enormous. “What are you still doing in bed? Surf’s up,” bellows a good natured Killian O’Kelly as he bangs on my door at the Turf’n’Surf BB he owns in the town. He also offers lessons to would-be surfers from this Victorian house on the seafront, but today I am being taught by Richie Fitzgerald.

He is quite the celebrity in global surfing circles. When not teaching, Fitzgerald is chasing giant waves all over the world. He also teaches the celebs who come to Bundoran and, while he is discreet about it, he says Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson and Sarah Jessica Parker have all learned to surf with him.

Today it is my turn. He decides today’s waves in Bundoran are too much for a total beginner – who can’t swim – so we drive 13km to Rossnowlagh. The water still looks wild. After just 10 minutes of sandbound instructions on popping (that’s standing on the board, to you and me) we walk out into the stormy waves.

It is April in Ireland, so you’d imagine the water would be freezing. And it may well be, but I don’t notice. The wetsuit has changed the face of Irish tourism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Irish children spent their summer holidays on windswept beaches being sent by their parents into the cold sea with nothing more than unfortunate Action Man Speedos to protect them against ice-cold waters. Today even the German discounters sell wetsuits, allowing the less hardy kids of today to flap around in the waves for hours without risking hypothermia.

Fitzgerald remembers, in the late 1980s when he took up surfing, his brother brought home a two-part wetsuit from London. The siblings shared it for a summer, alternating the top and bottom half on different days.

Spurred on by the lack of kit, his family opened a tiny surf shop in the town in 1989. It sold board wax and ties and a stock of three suits – small, medium and large. In 1990, we had a glorious summer and won the World Cup in Italy by losing 1-0 to the host nation in the quarter finals in Rome. In a cheered nation, surfing took off and hasn’t stopped.

Business is booming now in Fitzgerald’s – it is odd and refreshing to hear someone being so upbeat right now. He says turnover in the first quarter of 2011 doubled on the same period last year, which was, in itself exceptionally good.

When you surf in the kind of high-tech wetsuit Fitzgerald has, you don’t care about the weather. As long as there are waves, there is fun. And make no mistake, surfing is ridiculous fun, even if you give it just two hours. You will have a whale of a time but it is just a little addictive and after the exhilaration of popping up on a board and riding a wave for even 10 seconds, you may want to feel that rush again and again.

O’Kelly’s Turf’n’Surf has added blo-karting to the business this year – the first place in Bundoran to do so. You sit in a three-wheeled go-kart-like vehicle with a large sail and power up and down the beach. It is fun way to pass a few windswept hours and because you are so close to the ground it feels like you are absolutely barrelling along, when the reality is quite different.

Adventure sports are where much of the tourism money in Ireland is right now. A conference in Killarney last year heard the market attracts almost a million overseas visitors annually, making it worth more than €1 billion to the economy each year.

Fáilte Ireland gets its importance. It has identified 13 different adventure hubs around the country and is using them to promote not just individual activities such as golf, hill walking or surfing, but all of them together to capture the widest possible market.

One of the most critical thing about the adventure tourists is they don’t care about the weather because they have the gear for it, and for many sports, such as mountain biking and hill walking, mild, slightly damp weather is actually better than unbroken sunshine.

Another key adventure milestone will be later this month when the country’s first Adventure Weekend showcase takes place in Dublin’s RDS. It has been organised by Ronan Healy, a man with a sunny disposition.

“Last summer, like many people, I was getting fairly sick of the recession,” he says. “I was in my car listening to the radio and they were talking about how the country was fecked. I was looking out the window at all these amazing things we have on offer and I started thinking, this stuff is not getting enough attention. So I thought I needed to get off my arse and do something about it. I want to highlight what Ireland has to offer and be really positive.”

So what’s his plan? His background is in event production and management and he says he wants to make the adventure weekend “really experiential. We want people to be able to go down a zip-line or go zorbing [rolling down a hill in a giant inflatable ball] and most importantly, we want people to realise how accessible this stuff is in Ireland.

“I am beating a patriotic drum here but all the exhibitors are from Ireland. We could have had people in showcasing mountain biking in the Pyrenees or surfing in Biarritz, but I said no. I want it to be about what Ireland has to offer.”

Those who go along to the RDS will get to do a lot of free stuff. There will be simulated parachute jumps in a vertical air tunnel, a purpose-built mountain bike track, free karting and, possibly, the most-excellent-sounding rage-buggy driving – no, we’ve no idea what it is either. There will also be extreme trampolining, a stunt zone featuring free runners, skaters, BMX bikers, inline skaters “and a really nice kids’ zone. The whole point is to make it as family-friendly and accessible as possible,” says Healy.

As you walk through the RDS over the weekend, he says, two things will catch your eye. “The power tower – where people will zip-line above your head – and the fan descender.” This is where you walk to the edge of a gang plank and just step off the edge. “I think it is the only thing I won’t be able to do.” He’d probably be useless on the Leap of Faith too, even if he is making another kind of one with the weekend ahead.

The Adventure Weekend takes place in the RDS Simmonscourt between May 20th and 22nd. Tickets cost €15. Family tickets for two adults and three children are €40. See theadventureweekend.ie for more