Well folks like the old saying goes all good things must come to an end and today marks the end of my career as a surf writer/journalist.
It was 15 years ago when I started writing about a sport that had taken over my life: surfing. As every surfer knows, it is an all consuming activity that results in you constantly wanting that green water fix.
You digest and pray over weather charts every day in the hope that the swell will be rolling and the winds light and off shore. When I started forecasting my first audience were a small band of fellow surfers that I travelled the coastline with back in the early ’90s. They were the Cork Waterman Association. We all suffered from the same condition of what’s-the-weather-doing-itis”.
I started forecasting by writing a small program to download wave buoy data and from there I started to email people in the club. After a few months I started to add in some waffle on events and locations. Before long the list of subscribers was in the thousands and I found myself writing travel stories for magazines around the globe.
I started FINS, Ireland’s first true surf magazine and things took off from there. Nearly eight years ago my work was picked up by Thomas Crosbie Holdings and I was given a weekly column, first in the Evening Echo and then in the Irish Examiner. This was a brave and bold move by De Paper as it was the first broadsheet to run a weekly surf column (thanks to Tony Leen sports editor). The rest is history.
The last 15 years have been nothing short of amazing. As a surf journalist and forecaster I have travelled the world and interviewed some of my sporting heroes. I have chased barrels in Indonesia, got ripped to shreds in Fiji, surfed the longest standing waves one can imagine in Morocco, hit all the continents and surfed every ocean, I have been run out of a few Aussie line ups by some unfriendly sharks (and locals) and I have surfed the entire length and breath of the Irish coastline.
What started as a passion became a job and all the while it never lost its appeal and element of fun. It has been my absolute honour to have written about surfing and surf forecasting but now it is time I focused on a new chapter in my life. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and all that stuff.
I want to thank the Irish Examiner for giving me the biggest boast of my writing career and I want to thank all the readers. I will miss the emails on Monday telling me when I got it right and wrong. Next week I will still look up my forecast model and check my little weather station but this time it will be for my eyes only. Then come Saturday I will throw my board on the roof and go surfing. After all that is what I am… a surfer. It has been a great adventure.
Stay safe and see you on the beaches.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/emSJlsWrLYY/post.aspx
Madeleine McCann The US embassy cables Energy Taxonomy Protest World Cup 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment