Living the dream and getting paid to do it

HOME AND AWAY NICOLE MORGAN (surfer): Mary Hannigantalks to Nicole Morgan who is in Hawaii for three weeks of winter training in her quest to retain her Irish surfing title

IT WAS 87 degrees in Hawaii yesterday, just a couple of dozen higher than the temperatures back home in Bundoran. Nicole Morgan misses Donegal when she’s on her travels, which she is for much of the year, but days like yesterday make her trips away more than, well, tolerable.

The reigning Irish and UK Pro Surf Tour champion, ranked seventh in Europe, is in Hawaii for three weeks’ winter training, the conditions, she says, as close to ideal as she’ll ever find.

“It’s such a beautiful place, really tropical with lovely warm water and a perfect climate,” she says. “There have been turtles in the water with us every surf – they just swim around us all, it’s so nice.

“Being able to spend six to eight hours in the water per day makes it so much easier to continue to improve my surfing. At home, especially at this time of year, water time is so limited in comparison and it makes it very hard to improve techniques.”

Three fellow Irish surfers – Damien Conway, Ronan Oertzen and Iarom Madden – are with Morgan on the trip, which she is using to prepare for the 2010 season.

“My goals for next year are to retain my Irish title, which I finally won this year (Morgan ended Easkey Britton’s quest for a five-in-a-row at Portrush), to break in to the top 10 at the World Surfing Championships and to compete on the European Professional Tour and finish in the top eight.”

Is that all? “And I want to prepare for the 2011 European Championships, where I hope to go just one heat better and achieve a medal for Ireland. I made the semi-final of this year’s competition and was just one good wave away from a place in the final and a medal. It’s the closest I’ve come and it was a good result, but I want a medal next time for sure.”

Morgan is, though, well used to a busy schedule. This year, in particular, has been jammed with activity, the Fermanagh-born surfer, who had spells living in Australia, Wales and Indonesia with her family before settling in Bundoran, just about finding the time to get married to her long-term boyfriend Niall Kennedy in Italy in July and for the ensuing two-week road trip/honeymoon around the country. “I kept panicking that I’d left my surfboards behind somewhere . . . only joking,” she lies.

By then she had finished her seven-month physiotherapy job with the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Ireland, “one I really enjoyed and found so rewarding”, before heading for Indonesia for a month of training and shooting photographs and video for her sponsors’ websites and advertising campaigns (O’Neill Europe, Oakley, Diverse Surfboards and Sport Northern Ireland).

“Actually, one of the places I stayed, Padang, was where the earthquake hit last month. The Ambacang Hotel, where I stayed for two nights, was flattened. It’s so sad to see such devastation in an area where a lot of people were already struggling to get by,” she says of the country she lived in as a child and came to love.

And it’s visiting – or, in this case, returning – to countries like Indonesia that is a significant part of the joy she takes from her sporting career. “I just want to continue to live the dream of actually getting paid to do what I love to do most: surfing every day and travelling to wonderful places around the world.”

In Hawaii she, like Conway, Oertzen and Madden, is under the tutelage of Joel Gray, a former British junior coach who, for the past four years, has taken teams of surfers to the islands for an intensive three-week training camp.

“It’s been great so far, lots of surfing, video analysis and physical training (I’ve discovered how much of a killer a four-mile soft-sand run is, by the way – my legs are killing me today!). I’m loving training and surfing with the guys because they don’t cut me any slack and make me work extra hard so that I can keep up with them,” says Morgan, the only female surfer in the camp.

“Joel is videoing every day and my coaching sessions involve analysing the footage to see where I’m going wrong – or even right sometimes. We also have a surf photographer with us the whole time, Alex Williams. He’s shooting photos for a number of surfing magazines in the UK and Ireland, along with providing photos to our individual sponsors.”

Being far from home is hardly a new experience for Morgan, her childhood globe-trotting with her parents, both teachers, and brother Mike (an Irish surfing champion himself) and sister Terri (now a singer songwriter of some talent), leaving her with a serious case of wanderlust.

Now, though, her travelling has a distinct purpose. “I want to compete at a more professional level next year and make a bigger name for Irish surfing overseas. Trips like this are all about trying to get my surfing closer to the international level, I want to use the time in Hawaii to get closer to that goal.”