When surfing at the weekend, your wheels may say more about you than you'd like, writes KILIAN DOYLE
THERE’S A subject about which I’ve been meaning to write about for ages – namely, the politics of surfers’ cars.
Surfing in Ireland used to be an underground pursuit, enjoyed by a hardy little crew with a great secret they were loathe to share. But now, those halcyon days are long gone.
The sport has exploded in the past decade. There are now, officially, more surfers here than Green Party voters and when the swell is pumping, Ireland’s coastal waters turn into surfer soup.
There are lots of reasons for this, from fashion to better wetsuits to internet weather forecasting. But the biggest factor of all is the boom in car ownership. Increased prosperity means more people can get to the waves. Which, for me at least, mean the days of shoving surfboards into a creaking jalopy’s hold in Busáras are long gone.
There is, I reckon, a certain inverse snobbery among surfers when it comes to their cars. The rationale is, the better your wheels, the more time you have spent earning money and, therefore, can’t have put in enough hours to be a good surfer.
So if you spot a brand new SUV with Billabong stickers on it at the beach you can bet your kneecaps it’s being driven by a perma-tanned solicitor who thinks owning a wetsuit makes him a rebel and who wouldn’t know a heavy barrelling wave if it suddenly unloaded on the balcony of his Dublin Docklands penthouse.
The converse is the chap who turns up in a battered old Ford Transit with bumpers held on with baling twine and rolled-up newspapers for windscreen wipers – he’ll enjoy fawning respect. Why? People know his shed is all he can afford because he’s hardcore. He has given up everything – job, girlfriend, possibly even a home – to surf every day. Consequently, he will absolutely shred in the water.
There’s a lot to consider when choosing your wheels. Can you fit your board? Could it double as a BB? Is the heater liable to conk out mid-February when your hands are too numb to unzip your wetsuit?
Most importantly, is it too plush? There’s no point in having fancy calfskin seats if your car is going to be a repository for reams of sand, damp towels, stinking wetsuits and lumps of rotting seaweed, not to mention the festering leftovers from the copious amounts of dashboard dining you’ll be doing while driving, between breaks, and while sitting waiting for the tide or wind to turn.
As a result, surfmobiles come in all shapes and sizes, from wrecked vans with psychedelic paintjobs like the inside of Jimi Hendrix’s skull, to boring family boxes, to giant homes on wheels, to Japanese modified hatchbacks with sound systems so loud they can create their own waves when the Atlantic isn’t co-operating. There’s even a chap in Bundoran who drives a De Lorean.
And then there’s the likes of me, who turns up alternately in my vintage Beemer and my fancy estate, which is the quintessential mode of the transport of that much-maligned breed – of which I am a reticent member – the weekend warrior.
Which brings me to another side of this snobbery: Merely having the wrong numberplate can sometimes get you in trouble.
In certain jealously-guarded secret spots, rolling up in a Dublin-registered car will result in you getting stink-eye stares only marginally less malevolent than you’d receive if you drove through Harlem wearing a pointy hat and waving KKK flags out the window.
Many are the brash blow-ins that have disrespected the indigenous surfers to such an extent that they’ve shivered up the beach to find “Locals Only” daubed across their windscreen in surfboard wax, which is about as easy to wipe off as a tattoo. Consider yourself warned.