Big Wave Surfing Ireland - Mullaghmore Tow Surfing

(big wave videos at the bottom of the post)
Last weekend saw one of the biggest swells to ever hit the West Coast of Ireland, and there were only a handful of surfers who braved the conditions. Are they courageous or just plain crazy? A little bit from column A, and a little bit from column B.

So sit back, relax, and watch Team 1 of Duncan Scott and Alistair Mennie and Team 2 of Ritchie
Fitz and Gabe Davies take on the biggest waves ever surfed in Ireland.

Oh, and to help spur on the competitive nature I'm sure these boy's have, leave a comment with the name of the surfer and which was the best wave!

Duncan Scott

Big Wave Surfing Mullaghmore, Ireland - Duncan Scott

Justin | Myspace Video

Alistair Mennie

Big Wave Surfing Mullaghmore, Ireland - Alistair Mennie

Justin | Myspace Video


Gabe Davies

Big Wave Surfing Mullaghmore, Ireland - Gabe Davies

Justin | Myspace Video



Big Wave Surfing Ireland

Justin | Myspace Video

Casino Betting

To celebrate the fact that I've been in Malta all week looking at gambling sites I thought I'd add a bit of gambling fun to the site.

Rock Werchter 2009 Pictures

Rock Werchter was a 4 fun filled day festival in Belgium.

For less than £300 you get one of the best line ups in music for the year, and a bunch of people to chill out, relax, and enjoy it with.

I'm working on the short clips I took while I'm there, but for now here's a couple of pictures from the adventure.

Amanda and Sarah in their best rock werchter festival gear

Freaking long line at the ATM 3 minutes after the gates opened on day 2

Someone sat down where Sarah was lying and took the jam out of her donut

Rock Werchter Love

Butterflies coming down during Cold Plays gig

An ABUNDANCE of butterflies

.... and Francis is down for the count

.... and Amanda was soon to follow

A look through my glasses during one of our afternoon naps

Waiting for Limp Biskit

Rodriguez y Gabrielle, simply amazing!

"It's all about the he said she said bullshit"

Leave girls and a wine bar for an hour and this is what I come back to

.... and then the face drawing began

2ManyDJs at Rock Werchter 2009

Milk was a bad choice...

Chicken was a good choice

Naked mud wrestling...... well you judge for yourself.

ANZAC Day 2009 Dawn Service in Gallipoli - Last Post

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Open Street Map Visualisation

While travelling I've been very lucky picking navigating my way around different places.

Lately the navigation is thanks to a handy sat nav I picked up in Italy at the beginning on my summer travels through Europe, but prior to that I wasn't quite as current with my technology (and I couldn't afford it).

I relied a lot on Google Maps or Open Street Map to print off maps or directions before we left and follow it as we drove.

Open Street Map is like the wikipedia of road maps and it relies on us to keep in current.

The video below is the growth rate of Open Street Map over a 12 months period, and you can visually understand how quickly contributions can spread around the world.

Go Technology. Go People.


OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Snow in London Photo's

In reverse order........... welcome to the images of London since I got back from Darwin...... the capital city of warm.

For my little brother Chaz!

View from my room

Snow in London

Yet again I take another giant step away from life as it were in Darwin.

On the walk up to the pub for a sunday roast and a pint it started to snow.  How beautiful, yet very cold, it was to walk along in the gentle falling snow.

When I awoke this morning things had changed a little.

As I opened the curtains to look out over the back yard all I could see was a white blanket of snow covering the world.

On the roof terrace sat about 8 inches of overnight snow, and in the front yard there was eight inches of snow ready to soak into my new grandpa slippers for my walk to work.

Compared to rain, snow is so much better to walk to work in.

I'm without my camera cable at the moment, but there will be a series of pictures put up this evening when I get home.

Simply beautiful.

Darwin to London

As the plane was descending into London I could hardly believe that what seemed like only moments ago I was enjoying a bag of grease from the Parap Markets on Saturday morning.

The last three months have been a blur of parties, celebrations, websites, new beginnings and the rekindling of old friendships.

Every morning was spent down at the Coffee Club for a couple of long blacks, maybe a bite to eat, and the conversational rantings of Paul Manning, Karen Stoddard, Bec Walker and myself (with the occasional special guest appearances of Skevos, Bok, Suzie and Lyoness). Big cheers to the Store Manager Anna and her young yet very capable Assistant Manager Lauren for starting our mornings off with a smile.

Lunchtimes started off at the pool for a bit of exercise before I caught the debilitating disease, slackbastardititis, and moved to lunches at the wok, sushi train, banyan tree and shenannigans.

Afternoons were spent at one place, Shenannigans, and thanks to some quick promotional thinking Power and Water staff now get Happy Hour there every day during the week. Often it was just the two beers in the afternoon, but every now and then someone had a problem we needed to get to the bottom of which required 4 pints.

Fortunately we worked out a plan to keep everyones drinks/shouts in order as well. If someone went three drinks up in a shout (purchased 3 of your drinks before you brought them one) you owed that person 0ral gratification. No matter how hard Paul and I tried, the girls would never let us shout drinks!!!

During all this fun that was being outside of work we still did get some things accomplished. I managed to make the Power and Water Internet site go live (although I had nothing to do with the colour scheme/design/navigation structure etc etc, please don't judge me ;), and built a new services based Intranet site using an Open Source CMS.

It's hard to come to grips with though. On Friday morning I walked to work in 5 minutes and broke into a sweat doing so. Tomorrow morning, Monday, I'll take a 30 minute tube ride into work and we're expecting snow. On Saturday I lived in Dariwn, a city with a population of 120,000 people. On Sunday I'm back to living in London, a city with the population of 7.5 million people.

I'll miss everyone in Darwin, a few much more then I would have first thought, but I'm sure I'll begin to slip back into London lifestyle pretty quickly. I've already got my grandpa slippers, tracksuit and hoody on....... a far cry from last sunday with a pair of boardies and a singlet.

Darwin Surf Report

We've always looking in two or three different places to get a good picture about how the surf is going to be because it's not the kind of place that is ever going to get featured on something like Magic Seaweed or Surfline.

After a bit of tweaking I managed to pull down the virtual buoy reports and the latest tide guides onto a single page which will be known as the Darwin Surf Report.

If it proves to be useful I will mash up a few more surf spots from around the place, but don't be alarmed there won't be directions to any of your secret spots, just an idea as to how the surrounding conditions are at any point in time.

Let me know if it needs anything else.......

Wave Finder

Earlier last year I set out down the East Coast of Australia in a Wicked Van in search of surfing adventure, and after 2 weeks of driving around I had certainly had that adventure.

The trip was unlike the last two van trips through Europe but a little more like the trip around Ireland we did for St Patrick's Day.

On both of the European van trips we had a sat nav that pointed us in the right direction, turn left in 400 meters, keep left for 249 kilometers, do a u-turn where possible....... and while it saved a lot of issues with having to rely on navigators it did on occasion lack a sense of discovery.

Rewind back to last years East Coast trip and there was no sat nav, in fact there wasn't even a map.  

A month before I left for the trip I bought Wave Finder Australia, a small pocket sized book detailing the most popular surf breaks in Australia, and in the lead up to the trip I browsed the pages making notes of where I wanted to visit.

The day before I flew to Ireland for the biggest swell ever to hit it's shores I bought two items, a wind/water proof jacket and the Wave Finder UK & Ireland which landed me smack bang on the cliffs at Mullaghmore and scored some big wave footage.

On both of those trips I used only the Wave Finder books to navigate me around the country and had some great adventures, great surfs, and scored some epic footage during that time.

The book doesn't give away any secrets, all of the breaks listed in here are well known so as not to give away any of the secret spots that surfers hold so dear.  It provides information on best wind/swell direction, tides, time of year, water temperature, and it even mentions a few surf shops to pick up supplies and a few places that your can crash for a few days.

In my opinion the book is a must have and provides the only map you'll ever need for a surfing adventure.

Pint after work

The mood is set.

You've had a long long day at work.

In fact, you've had four long day's at work.

You know that tomorrow is Friday and you can unwind then, but that's my time! Why should work frustrations encroach on my time. It's okay though, the bad day is over and you're on the way to the pub..... albeit after the sun has long since gone down.

You pass a few windows with the lights still on and laugh to yourself, "ha, that was me yesterday".

You reach your local and, even though you've missed happy hour by 3 hours, you're ready to enjoy the beer you've been looking forward to since brushing your teeth yesterday morning.

You find a seat at the bar, get served first, and it's by the cute barmaid that hasn't been there in a month! Could life get any better!!!!

As you pick up your pint to take that long awaited and well deserved first sip, the song changes. You hadn't even noticed there was any music playing up to that point.....

It's one of those songs from your earlier years, during your hay day. The one that reminds you of good times and great friends. The one that you love to sit back, listen, and reminince about the good ol' days of 8 years ago.

You close your eyes, put the pint to you lips and let your mind cast back to that time when you were........

**click** **click** **click**

Wait a minute. That's not my song any more.

The now much less cute barmaid has skipped your song. Your song!

Your opportunity to sit back and reminisce has now been skipped along to "Man Eater". And not the Hall & Oats version. I could deal with the Hall and Oats version. She's skipped it for the Nelly Furtado version! If that isn't bad enough it's followed up with ABBA's "Waterloo".

There's nothing left to do except put your pint down and think about how lucky those people still at work really are.........

Google Map Surf Spots

I'm thinking about adding a Surf Spots section to my film and other blog site. What it would effectively do is show the surf spots that I have found during my travels through Europe, Bali, East Coast of Australia, Mexico etc etc.

I would also plot places to sleep, sources of water, nice views, and interesting places.

It's basically a guide to where I've been and how I've done it, so someone doesn't have to spend the 30 minutes extra driving around trying to find a free parking area at 10pm when they've been driving for 12 hours on a hangover........... not that I ever had to do that ;)

My main concern is that occasionally people have been upset about my directions to certain spots, even after they've been searching for the spot, found it, and then are upset that they've found it..........

Here's an example of what I mean from google maps and tiny url of the surf spots in Baleal, Portugal.
Does anyone have any thoughts?

Big Wave Surfing - Gethin Jones Danger Hunters

Today is the first nice day of weather we've had in London for the past week, and thankfully it has fallen onto a weekend.

As usual though my head was a little cloudy in the morning thanks for a few after work drinks and then a few more catching up with Michelle.

I couldn't do a day on the couch today though as I had to prepare my footage and head off to Oxford Circus to drop it into a post production office.

What footage, what for? Well I'm glad you asked or this would be an even more pointless post.

A company called Summer Films have been doing an episode of Gethin Jones' Danger Hunters with Al Mennie and Andrew Cotton for their big wave surfing in Ireland. We've been talking over the past few months about getting together the next time they were out filming so that I could get into the water and do some filming with my HV20 SPL water housing, but every time they were ready to film I was either in Australia, filming the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona or sunning during the summer in Europe.

They have reached post production now and have asked to review the waves that Al surfed back in December last year in Mullaghmore, Ireland.

Fingers crossed that some of my clips get in as not only will I pick up a small fee for the footage, but I'll also get a mention in the credits for doing the filming. Hey, it's a shameless plug for myself but it's a pretty good way to start to get my name out in the field.

As for the rest of today, I've gone back to the first days of London when I would sit in at Apostrophe cafe and look out of St Paul's while catching up on my blog......... but as with everywhere times are tough and the cafe is starting to get stingey with their coffees.............. for god's sake I asked for a medium!


Now that I've finished that coffee I'm noticing that everyone seems to be walking around in slow motion like that episode of Futurama........ it's really starting to worry me. It involves one of the best quotes I've ever heard, and is one of the best moments in cartoon history.

Bender: You seem a tad wound up, buddy. And your face is greasy. Real greasy. You been up all night?
Fry: Of course I've been up all night! Not because of caffeine, it was insomnia. I couldn't stop thinking about coffee! I need a nap. (He falls asleep, then wakes up) Coffee time!
Bender: (Gets out Le Grand Cigar) Ah, mighty fine smokable.
Fry: Fancy cigar, why don't you smoke it already? Puff, puff, gogogogogo!

I guess I better head back to the counter and get another coffee to calm my nerves.

Surfing Sopelana in Spain

Yesterday we went down to the beach at Sopelana. It's a beautiful place which "looks" like it would be a great place to surf if the swell would just pick up a little.

Ibon was chatting to the guy that runs the bar and this weekend has an International Surfing competition on. We're off to check it out this morning so fingers crossed the swell picks up a bit.

Photo's to come.........

Sagrada Familia

The Sagrada Familia is simply amazing.

A single piece of work that has taken over 100 years to build, and it is not due to be finished any time soon.  Estimates are that, should the funding and work be maintained at the current rate, it will be finished by 2030........... some 100 years after the death of the buildings architect, Antoni Gaudi.

On my first visit to Barcelona I saw the work from the top of the tourist bus, and this time I covered every inch of the place that the public could step and took over 200 photographs.

For now time is short so I won't go into detail just yet, but there will be more pictures along with an explanation on those and the one's already uploaded here.

Surfing Portugal

Well it´s been a while but I´m back in front of a computer again.


When the Alyce, Glen & Meagan clan left the trip they accidently collected my electricity converter which has left me without power for the laptop, which means no blogging.


I have been writing a bit, taking lots of notes about the places I´ve been (especially the great surfing venues in Portugal) and since Sintra I´ve even been able to start taking some photo´s again. That´s right, another Canon Ixus has joined the party (I´ve gone back to the Ixus 70 seeing as I´ve now spent about $900.00 on the camara´s just to wind up with the same camera I started with).

From Sintra I headed up north towards Peniche, which to be fair to the town isn´t the best place I´ve been on the trip so far. It is a must stop though, as just down the road is Baleal which is an awesome little spot for waves for all levels of surfer.

The main break, from memory is Ajeed but I´ll confirm in a post just for that, is a great left hander that breaks over rock. Most surfers were getting 2-3 turns on the crappy waves, more on the good set waves.

To the left of that is Baleal beach which offers some great beginner waves, and as you go further down the beach they begin to pitch a little earlier and on a big day I imagine would offer some small barrelling sections.

I´ll be posting a few photo´s soon (charging the camera battery at the internet place at the moment) and a video of the Baleal break.

I´m in figura de foz at the moment and staying in a car park at Buarcos which seems to have some nice waves just outside of a fairly shallow and rocky paddle out. Again, I´ll be back with some pictures and hopefully some water footage in the next couple of days.

La Tomatina - Tomato Festival in Spain

La Tomatina........

What a crazy, crazy time today has been!

I spent another night down in the El Salver with the Smashed Travel crew and was up at 7am to head in to Valencia to pick up Glen, Meagan and Alyce.

Everyone was a bit slow in the morning, 7am starts will do that to you, but once we stopped off for some treats at the servo, push started a big blue van, and pulled in to the Lidl shopping centre in Bunol we were excited to get into some tomatoes.

We walked into the town and stopped off for a beer (mainly just to use the toilet) at one of the cafes along the way before reaching the main street where it all happens.

There were thousands of people pushed way down the street, and not before long we were cast down a side ally with the force of the relentlessly moving crowd.

As you could probably guess, La Tomatina gets a little wet........... it gets a little messy, so I came up with the idea to put my camera and card into some water proof pouches to save them.

Smart Me.

The girls, however, took it one step further and had their pouches tied around their necks, while I kept mine in the boardies pocket under the safety of a velcro strip.

Sure enough, 5 minutes into the crowd I went to grab the camera for a shot and it was gone, along with it the cash I brought and the debit card I had.

Luckily I had the key on the key rope (as you would when surfing) so we could get back to the van without any hassles.

Of course, that means that all the photos are on other peoples cameras so I can't put up the awesome photo's from the day....... but they'll come.

I'll be surprised if at least one person didn't get broken ribs out of the sheer force of the crowd, it makes a trip on the london tube during rush hour seem like a solitary confinement.

It begins and ends very abruptly, but while it's on it's non stop action which keeps your heart racing and, when your not being crushed, a smile on your face.

I recommend La Tomatina for anyones around the world trip.

Sleeping on the beach in Valencia Spain

Unfortunately I don´t have the camera handy to upload these priceless shots, but they´ll be along soon enough.

We arrived in Valencia yesterday and hit the water right away. After a quick swim Glen and myself ventured into a game of hacky sack on the beach, and the girls quickly followed suit.

I´ve now identified at least 17 leg muscles that I didn´t actually know I had, but at least it did some work towards using up the 1500 calories we each consumed at macca´s earlier that day.

Sarah took us to a roof top bar which was awesome, and while all the girls (now traveling with 3 hotties) were being chatted up by the other guys Glen and I sat at the bar and looked on with a smile.

Unbeknown to us, the F1 is on this weekend so the beach is a buzz with people, and the Fasion TV cruise boat is parked in the harbour. They keep sending super models over to get us to come on board, but I kind of like sleeping on the beach so I´ve denied their many attemps.

Meeting up with the Smashed Travel group again tomorrow and we lose Sarah back to London, but we gain Lauren and Gary for the festival!

Photo´s of Valencia and crazy nigths out to follow........

West Europe Road Trip - Marseilles, Montpellier, Collioure

Before the car went by the wayside, we stopped in to Marseilles, Montpellier and Collioure to round off our south coast of France trip.

We met a great guy at a pub in Marseilles, Chris from England, who told us many a story about the world and his travels.

It's late though, so I think the pictures will do this part of the journey more justice then my tired stories will.

A view from below the Notre Dame Cathedral, Marseilles

Inside Norte Dame Basilica, Marseilles

Outside Norte Dame Basilica, Marseilles

Montepellier, land of many dentist surgeries and no dentists

The view from our last nights sleep in Dr Who in Collioure

Sarah and Alyce showering in Collioure...... on the beach

Me showering in Collioure...... on the beach