[0:12]Tramore is a small town on the south coast of Ireland. Its long and unspoiled stretch of coastline makes it very popular with tourists.
[0:26]And the sea plays an important role in life here. Just ask local resident Grace Doyle. Grace is a qualified maths teacher, but she decided to take a career break to pursue her lifelong love of surfing. So I started surfing at maybe 11 or 12 years old, but I always used to be in the ocean and playing on a bodyboard, and I used to always know what surfing was and wanted to do it. My oldest brother got a surfboard lesson for his 21st birthday, and that eventually just got passed down to me as I grew up because my other brother started doing it, and then I wanted to do it naturally. Each day, Grace checks the weather conditions online. If the waves are good, she packs her boards and drives to one of her favorite spots. Luckily, the Irish coastline offers plenty of places to surf due to its position in the Atlantic Ocean, attracting surfers from all over the world. Surfing as a sport is growing rapidly in Ireland and reflects a global trend. Grace's success in competitive surfing has led to several sponsorship deals, allowing her to chase waves all over the world. I've been to a lot of places around the world, um Central America, Indonesia, uh Europe. The best wave I've ever surfed is probably in Indonesia. So the water's warm, the waves are crystal clear and super clean. Part of it is because they're bigger, so I enjoy the bigger waves. Today, there are an estimated 35 million surfers around the world, and the industry has annual revenues of around $100 billion. How does Grace account for this growth in popularity? There's a lot of media coverage lately, um a lot more than there used to be. Um so you've got like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, and everything is just being put out there now whereas years ago, it would be quite hard. You'd have to wait for the magazines to come out to see the footage. People are seeing how healthy surfing is as a lifestyle. So if you surf, you're out with nature, you're exercising, you're having fun, you're getting everything in one go, so I think people are drawn to that because it's something healthy and fun at the same time. But surfing can be dangerous too. I guess the scariest thing that's happened to me as a surfer is being held down for quite a long time under the water. So you might fall off a wave, and it's quite a big wave, so it just holds you down for quite a long time. Um once it happened me in Indonesia, and I just thought that that maybe it was the end, but then you always just come up. Uh I've learned to relax, so when it happens, you know it's going to be a long hold down, so you just have to rely on holding your breath and relax because if you panic, then you're going to run out of breath faster. Does Grace enjoy the element of danger? To a point, like it's part of the adrenaline rush, so I would enjoy the element of danger in the sense of like I'm out in big waves and I know if I wipe out, there's a high risk I'm going to get injured, but there's also a high risk I'm going to get the best wave of my life, so I, I like that adrenaline rush.
[4:24]But Grace knows that this can go too far. I have seen people that are out in waves that they shouldn't be out in, and you can see before it even happens, that stuff is going to happen to them. It's a fine line in that sense that they're putting everything and everything around them at risk, like in terms of losing them, if they die, because that's at that at that level of big wave surfing, if you wipe out, like, in those kind of waves, it's like, are you going to die or not? It's not like, are you going to hurt yourself? It's more like, are you going to come up?
[5:01]As with all extreme sports, this element of danger is part of the attraction, and it can be extremely addictive. Does Grace consider herself an adrenaline junkie? Yeah, definitely because when you're addicted to surfing, you're addicted to that adrenaline rush. Um it's just something you want to keep going back for more and more of. So you have a really, really good surf, and you think you're satisfied for like a week, but no, the next day you're like, I want to do the same again. It's definitely something that you're drawn to time and time again, and I don't think it's just the adrenaline, it's being out in nature, in water. Like several times surfing has gotten me over difficult times in my life. So I lost my dad when I was 16, and surfing is what got me through that, surfing with my friends and people around here. Um there's something about being in nature that sort of relaxes you and just gets your mind off everything else. Grace has managed to organize her life around surfing. For her and many others like her, it isn't just an extreme sport. It's a way of life.
