Swell reunion for boys of summer

Surfing in Ireland: Decades before the sport became colourful and sexy, the pioneers of Irish surfing took to the waves on makeshift boards. Keith Duggan meets some of them.

Old guys on surfboards: it was never meant to be sexy or glamorous. For the last week, a platoon of about 40 greybeard wave riders have been whooping it up in the bitter October foam of Ireland's western seaboard. And although it is hardly the stuff of vintage surfing glamour, Irish surfing - which still sounds like pure eccentricity to many ears - began with them. These were the pioneers, the inventors - the Madmen.

And in what has been a reunion of sorts, a formal recognition of that summer 40 years ago when someone - probably Kevin Cavey - caught Ireland's virgin wave, they have been doing it all again.

They have been charging through Ireland's wintry waves all week, squeezing sore limbs and wobbly bits into skintight body-suits, laughing at how they have become grey and chunky and stiffer than the fibreglass boards they can still - in those transcendent moments when George Freeth or whichever surf god happens to smile down upon them - temporarily master and control and on which the can achieve the feeling.

For the majority of their lives, these ordinary men bow to the preoccupations of most men in their 50s or 60s. Death and taxes bug surfers too. Once-obedient, athletic bodies give out stink to them now. Things break down. Joints tighten up and wear out.

Old surfers are presented with life's classic dilemma: they have acquired the knowledge to master the sea in ways beyond them when they were young, but no longer have their youthful frames. So they struggle on - anything rather than give up the ghost.

They revisit the old haunts in Lahinch, in Easkey, Strandhill and Rossnowlagh, surf with whatever grace and litheness remain, tell yarns and drink late. Some were genuinely world-class watermen, others surfed for mere personal pleasure: the distinction is blurred and immaterial now.

What began as a vague idea to bring back the original gang who were weird enough to try out crude boards on a wild shoreline that was traditionally the preserve and master of fishermen, grew into something more formal and powerful and, in the best sense, sentimental.

"We all nurture our own pasts," acknowledges Kevin Cavey, "and when you get a chance to relive a moment in time, you are drawn to it."

Or, as Brian Britton puts it, "we just wanted to get together again and acknowledge the moment before we all start to keel over."

Given the popularity of contemporary Irish surfing, with burgeoning surf schools, the hip credentials of surfing clothing labels and parents happy to shell out the fast cash for all the latest stuff, it is hard to imagine just how primitive and innocent those early days were.

When Kevin Cavey first caught a wave in Brittas Bay, it was on a home-made wooden plank fastened with buoyancy barrels and crude fins. He reckons he mastered a one-footer, having been inspired by an article in the Reader's Digest. But he was obsessed, writing to Surf magazine and sending photographs of himself to prove there was at least one kindred spirit on the outer edge of Europe.

The arrival of Roger Steadman from Guernsey brought to Ireland the first proper fibreglass board. Steadman and Cavey were like the Lewis and Clarke of Ireland in the late 1960s, foraging boldly westward and slowly convincing coastal kids, such as the Brittons in Rossnowlagh and the O'Brien-Morans in Tramore, that surfing was possible in the land of saints and scholars.

A small, tight fraternity grew up. By 1966, there were official Irish surf clubs. The same year, Cavey was invited by the organisers of the world surfing championship in California - incredulous at the notion of an Irish surfer - to compete in a field that included demigods such as Mike Doyle and Richard Pirelli. He went.

That was the spirit of the time. They were young, countercultural, utterly seduced by the sport, and touchingly naive.

When the Irish Surfing Association began sending teams to the European championships in Biarritz in the late 1970s, the cheapest way to get there was to join a pilgrimage trip to Lourdes.

Dressed in their surfing duds, the Irish team were often given the honorary front-of-house seats in the plane, beatniks but still polite boys among the halt and the holy.

"And we had lads from north and south, all creeds," remembers Britton. "There'd be four whole rosaries said by the time we would get to Lourdes. I remember one year sitting between Rocci Allen and Grant Robinson - Ulster boys who "kick with the other foot" - during a recitation of the rosary. And they were muttering, 'Jesus, good job me auld fella can't see me now.' But it got us to Biarritz. Some of the greatest piss-ups we had were in Lourdes."

And even though they always paid their dues at the shrine, they never finished first.

When Kevin Naughton first visited Ireland as a 15-year-old in 1969, he gloomily resigned himself to a month without surfing, which was then all the rage in his home in California. Naughton's parents were from Galway - in a curious, karmic link, his mother attended the secondary school with Britton's mother in Salthill - and emigrated to America after his father, like many medicine graduates of the era, was offered work there.

"I often asked my father why they left and the way he described Ireland in that time, the 1950s, was as a place where literally everything was at a standstill," says Naughton.

They settled on the east coast metropolis, moving west only when Kevin, then just seven years old, became deaf owing to an ear impairment that months of surgery could not alter.

"Eventually, my doctor said somewhere dry and hot might be the only solution, and my folks decided to move to California, which was an incredibly alien idea to Irish-American people back then. And it worked. My hearing was perfect again after a few months. So we stayed."

The Naughton's lived off Huntington Beach, arguably the place where the surfing revolution originated when George Freeth, the son of an Irish sailor and a Polynesian mother, performed near mythical feats on the old wooden longboards in the early years of the 20th century.

Jack London wrote adoringly about Freeth, who allegedly looked like Elvis decades before Elvis was born. Freeth was beautiful and modest and fearless in the water, hauling dozens of hapless bathers out of the Pacific as a volunteer lifeguard and eventually, after an April rescue in San Diego, perishing from the global influenza epidemic of 1919.

Freeth's place was filled by a protege, the charismatic Olympian swimmer Duke Kahanamoku, often regarded as the father of modern surfing.

By the time Kevin Naughton roamed Huntington beach, surfing was booming, infused with the music of the Beach Boys, the escapist themes of the hippy culture and its own sense of separateness and cool.

"My parents were raised to treat the ocean as a place you stayed away from unless you intended drowning; it was the Irish way," recalls Naughton. "And they never came to understand what surfing meant to me. They were happy for me to pursue it, but they thought I was nuts.

"And I remember on my first visit to Galway in 1969, we were driving right up to the North to see friends. And I was bored out of my mind until we were passing through Bundoran, crossing the old stone bridge, and I look out and see this perfect, empty, six-foot wave (yet to be christened The Peak). Crying out to be surfed!

"And I start screaming, 'Stop the car, stop the car.' Course, my folks just kept driving. But it was then I became aware of the possibilities of Ireland and a few years later, when I was old enough, I came back and found that these guys had already come to the same conclusions."

Naughton went on to become one of the world's pre-eminent surfers in the 1970s and was a big-wave specialist, navigating the more notorious 40-foot-plus breaks like the celebrated "Jaws" phenomenon in Hawaii. But he was also compulsively drawn to regions of the world yet to be surfed, journeying the coasts of Africa and Asia with the photographer Craig Peterson and sending back dispatches to the burgeoning surf magazines that have since become classics.

It took him years to convince American friends of the quality and magic of the Irish surfing experience and he didn't care if they never came. It was the desolation and soulful emptiness of the Irish surfing enclaves - the antithesis of all that Huntington beach sunshine and glamour - that he was drawn to.

Looking back, it all changed very fast. Miraculously, there are hours and hours of film of those early years. RTÉ sent Fred Cogley - later The Voice of Rugby - to the Northwest to see what the fuss was about and he went sensibly armed with a pair of fisherman's waders.

There is footage of Steadman and one or two others in their beatnik surf gear in Lahinch with countrymen wearing their cloth caps in the background. A church bell rings and the three local men instinctively lift their caps. It sounds like a cliched vision of the crossing of the traditional and radical cultures, but it happened that simply.

And before long, the tensions that run through surfing around the world threatened the frigid, harmonious Irish scene. When a drinks manufacturer sponsored the Irish national championships in the late 1970s, a banner was posted across the ruined tower at Easkey declaring, 'I Was Into Surfing Until I Discovered Smirnoff."

The battle between those who champion competitive surfing and those loyal to the dreamier, idealised notion of "soul" surfing is nothing new. It caused private and sometimes public rows between Brian Britton, who organises competitions as head of the ISA and his brother Barry. And when the ISA lured the world championships to Donegal in the 1990s, local surfers opposed to the scale and commerce of the competition successfully petitioned to have it relocated.

"Barry and I have this deal that our relationship as brothers is more important," laughs Britton now.

"There is no better boy to share a wave with than Barry. And we decided after nearly coming to blows over our views on surfing after pints that we just won't talk about surfing culture. And I spent a month in a camper van with him down in New Zealand there when I was 50 and we had a fabulous time. You agree to differ. And it comes back to family. All of our kids surf. The thing just keeps going."

It changed faster than any of them could register. It seemed like yesterday when they were like moonwalkers on the Irish coastline. This week, the pilgrimage visited the golf course at Doonbeg, designed by Greg Norman (a surf enthusiast himself).

A right of way, a path for surfers to reach the water, runs across the 14th fairway, after the European federation and the ISA fought for the privilege in court. Access to land is fast becoming an issue.

And as more and more kids paddle out for the thrill of their first wave, crowded waterlines are becoming a problem, with the water that supposedly represents unfettered freedom necessarily divided up and parcelled out like plots of land amongst the squabbling surfers.

Nowadays, the pioneering generation are torn between wonderment at the huge numbers of Irish youngsters surfing and a wistful longing for the years when they had the entire Atlantic coast to themselves.

"Last year, I was back in Bundoran with my son and there was The Peak, the same, perfect six-foot wave. Except this time it was pretty busy out there, " says Naughton. "And I said, 'Kyle, let's get out there now.'

"And when we were paddling out, it just hit me that my son was 15, the same age as I was when I first saw the wave. And it kinda choked me up. Because it all comes back to the ocean, that affinity you have with the waters. It is what all surfers share.

"And the great thing about the search for the perfect wave is that is a transitory experience.

"It is fleeting. You can keep going. And it has absolutely shaped my life. Forty years of surfing? I think we could probably all say that."

This weekend, they finish up in Britton's home place of Rossnowlagh, where the annual intercounty championships take place, filled with slick young male and female Irish surfers for whom the thought of life - let alone surfing - in the late 1960s must seem preposterously distant.

The older men, the originals, battered and punch drunk after a week spent chasing the ghosts of their younger selves on waves that seem bigger and crueller now, will be happy enough to be elbowed to the edge.

They know the kick - which the gentle, reserved Kevin Cavey, compares to "wrestling the forces of nature so you get this contact with energy and gravity you can probably only get from driving a car at very high speed of jumping from an aeroplane" - is primarily the pursuit and privilege of the young.

But that doesn't mean they have to quit! That has been their discovery amid a week of nostalgia and toasting absent friends: the remorseless march of the calendar and the advance of the pacemaker and aching-hip years does not dull that thrilling call that the mere sight of a perfect break of waves sets forth.

Age cannot kill the kid in them. If anything, the draw becomes stronger - and less forgiving.

"Surfing is punishing. It is humiliating," laughs Naughton. "The next day, everywhere hurts. Everywhere. And your ego hurts the most. You come out all battered up, saying, 'Is this it? Have I lost it all? Are we all washed up?'"

He doesn't need to answer those questions. After all, they are still there, the original boys of summer, out there on the magnificent, thrashing horizon where 40 long years can be rolled back in one perfect gush of saltwater.