My kids are growing up fast, my joints are beginning to ache and it’s taking me that bit longer to put on my wetsuit. Call it vanity, call it a keep sake, but it occurred to me late last year when I turned 50 that aside from the odd photograph I had no visual record of my more than 20 years of surfing.
Plenty of increasingly faded memories alright, but nothing that you could shake a stick at.
Just as important as this realization was the thought that every local surf scene has its regular lineup of kooks, groms and rippers, as well as its elders. And it was this latter group that I wanted to honor in some way.
“Grumpy old dudes,” “silver surfers,” “good ol’ boys,” and the list can go on. Call them what you will but these same surfers keep an eye out for others in the water and enforce our rules when necessary, but more importantly they keep on keeping on by continuing to surf. In doing so they provide an inspiration to one and all: young and well, young at heart.
This is the video I made with Alan Coyne, Stuart McMullen and Dave Flynn with the help of award winning director, photographer and, himself a surfer, Kev L. Smith.
The date was April 2 2016. The breaks were Cornish and Moy, off the coast of Lahinch, Co. Clare, Ireland. Perfect by anyone’s standards for a Life in the Day.
