Rory O'Neill, DUKW driver, Viking Splash Tours
I'VE BEEN DOING this for six years. Prior to that I had my own haulage business, but it wasn't working out the way I had hoped. So I was looking for a seasonal job, saw the ad and applied. The first day I met the owner he had me out driving a duck [ or DUKW], which was a bit of a surprise.
DUKWs are genuine second World War amphibious vehicles, most of which saw action. Some of them came from war museums in France, and one came from one of the Beach Boys. He bought it and then couldn't figure out how to drive it.
We work year round except December and January, when we close and I travel. On a typical day I'll do two tours in the morning and two or three in the afternoon, depending on the route, finishing up most days at about 5.30pm or 6pm.
I come into work from Co Meath by motorbike, an 1100cc BMW, which is fantastic. No matter what the traffic it takes me 40 minutes to get to the garage on Church Street. I get there at 9am and change out of my biker gear and into my Viking tunic. Then it's an hour making sure lights, wheels, propellers and so on are all okay.
We have two start points, Bull Alley, at St Patrick's Cathedral, and the top of Dawson Street. Our customers are usually there waiting for me when I arrive. We can hold up to 28 people; around 40 per cent of them are Irish.
Those that want to put on Viking helmets, then we head off on a tour around the city centre, passing Trinity, Christ Church, Kildare Street and Merrion Row, among other places, before heading down to Grand Canal Basin.
Most of them think it's a normal bus tour, so they get a bit of a surprise when we stop and start donning life jackets. Then we splash into the water and they get even more of a surprise. If I get it right at least some of them will get wet. I tell them about some of the local landmarks, like the U2 studio, and local wildlife. There are cormorants, seagulls and fish, as well as two species of freshwater whale: bicycle whales and shopping-trolley whales.
I talk for the full hour and a quarter, pointing out things like the Wolfe Tone statue in front of the standing stones at Stephen's Green, which we call Tone Henge.
All the time, because we are a band of marauding Vikings, our aim is to sneak up on unsuspecting Celts and scare them. We look out for people who haven't seen us because they're talking on their mobile phones or busy reading maps. When we spot one we give them the Viking roar. It can scare the bejaysus out of them. Very often they'll shake their fists back at us, but our real aim is to make them do an Irish dance across the pavement in fright. Actually, our real aim is to make sure everybody gets off the bus laughing, which they do.
All in all it's a really fun job. And I don't have to do VAT returns.
• In conversation with Sandra O'Connell