Hundreds of Web Summit attendees made the break for the West lured by stand up paddling around the lake isle of Innisfree, kayaking on Lough Gill and making business deals on the waves alongside some of the world’ s top surfers.
Watching Peggy Johnson, one of Microsoft’s top deal makers, pulling pints at Sligo pub Shoot the Crows on Saturday evening was a bonus.
“There was a time when the golf course was synonymous with networking and deal making but a lot of people in the tech world are into activity sports,” explained local surfer and tech enthusiast Allan Mulrooney, one of the organisers of the Surf Summit.
He and his friend former Westlife singer Kian Egan were among the hosts who brought high profile guests including world record big wave surfer Garrett McNamara and Adam Berke of AdRoll, on a whirlwind tour of Sligo’s best known surfing and party locations.
About 300 people, most of them delegates from the Web Summit, attended talks by Mr McNamara, European surf champion Pauline Ado and local sufer Easkey Britton over the weekend.
Mr McNamara, who broke the world record when he surfed a 100 foot wave in Nazare in Portugal, had never been to Ireland before. "We took him to Mullaghmore and Bundoran and he told us he will be back to surf here next month," said Mr Mulrooney.
A range of activity sports including stand up paddling, kayaking, kite boarding and surfing kept delegates busy on Saturday.
“The weather was amazing. We even had a double rainbow,” said Easkey Britton, founder of Waves of Freedom whose lecture focussed on how surfing can be a tool for social change.
While guests sampled everything from locally brewed White Hag craft beer to traditional music in well-known Sligo bars Connollys and McGarrigles, there was also time for some business at the Surf Summit.
" We had investors here from Singapore, the US and Australia and a few deals were clinched", said Mr Mulrooney.
“The setting may have been unusual - some investors did not expect to be drinking hot whiskeys at a camp fire on the shores of Lough Gill listening to Dave O’Hara of SUP forAll reciting Yeats poetry but I think they enjoyed it”.
A bonus, he added, was that the Wifi worked well, there were no traffic jams and Peggy Johnson knows how to pull a pint of Guinness.
