Surfing allows Easkey Britton satisfy a lifelong love for the ocean

In the winter of 2014, Easkey Britton persuaded her father to join her in surfing the "barrens", the remote and forbidding stretches between the small fishing villages of Newfoundland.

Not that it took much persuasion: miles and miles of empty coastline, the promise of never-surfed waves, solitude, the punishingly cold water of the Labrador current, day after day without encountering another soul; it sounded like heaven to Barry Britton.

They spent three weeks there with no plan other than to drive and surf. Britton had lived in St John’s for a year on a post-doctoral fellowship and she felt frazzled after four years immersed in academia. Early on in the trip, father and daughter fell asleep on a desolate beach, lined with driftwood, waiting for a swell to arrive. After hours in the water, they camped there that night.

‘Wrapped in a blanket by a driftwood fire at the end of the day, feeling surfed-out, shoulders burning a little from all the paddling, skin a little wind-burned, cooking spuds in the fire, replaying our favourite waves for each other, unthinking, the mind meandering, my restlessness began to ebb,” she writes of that evening. ‘Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing!’, Dad would say to me before falling asleep to the sound of salty, bone-white logs crackling and hissing in the flames.’

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It’s a luminous piece of advice.

The subject of time and how we spend it runs through the heart of Britton's just-published book Saltwater In The Blood, a highly personal account of her intense relationship with the sea. She was a literal water baby: her parents sat her on a surfboard in the ocean at home in Rossnowlagh before she could walk. That fascination with and love for sea water started then and hasn't abated.

The book charts her evolution from a teenage surfer who represented Ireland in European competitions to one of the first women to pursue the 'big wave' phenomenon of the past decade. The chapters also grapple with the challenges she experienced as a woman in the male-oriented surf culture of the 1990s and 2000s. But mostly, it's a personal reflection of what it is to live with the sea as a constant in your life.

Britton has lived at a fairly furious pace, excelling in surfing while pursuing a doctorate and finding time to pioneer a series of projects designed to encourage more women to surf.

A decade has passed since she travelled to Baluchistan on the coast of southeast Iran. She wore a hijab, gave surf lessons to local girls and started a club which still exists. The story was so novel and heartening that it attracted international media coverage. But acting as an advocate and an instrument to encourage women to experience the water has been a reflex action wherever she has travelled.

Origins of surfing

“As women, since the moment we were born we have been conditioned to move in the world in a certain way; to contract, withdraw and become small, maybe even invisible in order to stay safe,” she writes towards the close of the book.

“For many, feeling unsafe is an everyday reality. Or those who have overcome the barriers, the sense of freedom through something like surfing in the sea can be powerful and linked to our fundamental need for recognition, equality and identity. It can allow us to expand after years of being conditioned to contract.”

Even as a child in Donegal, Britton was aware of a gulf between the glossy and sunny depiction of surfing in popular culture and the remoteness of the local experience. She read the magazines and watched the video documentaries and was struck by the absence of women. The more she read and learned, the clearer it became that women had always been central to the origins of surfing in ancient Polynesia.

"The white man explorer discovered it in the 1700s but it probably goes back to 400 AD," she says, speaking on a rainy afternoon on a Zoom call from her home near Westport.

“But modern surfing became a very different thing and was tied in with beach culture and recreation. Whereas surfing within cultures was a way of creating social connections and for supporting wellbeing and a spiritual connection with the ocean. That kind of got taken over as well in the westernization of it. But the other part is women have been there from ancient times to present day but were just not at all portrayed or visible in surf media or competitions. And, obviously, I grew up with a quite unique relationship with surfing. So I just wanted to dig deeper into that and hopefully shake up the representation a little bit.”

She finished surfing competitively almost 10 years ago. The issue of whether surfing is a sport or a loftier pursuit has always divided its tribes. The Britton family became one of Ireland’s pioneering families almost by accident: Easkey’s grandmother brought boards back from America in the 1960s for guests in the family hotel. Instead, her sons became obsessive about the pursuit.

Barry Britton never understood the idea of surfing with rules and regulations: his brother Brian became a leading figure in world surfing and brought elite contests to Ireland. Easkey still believes in the benefits of competitive surfing and is confident that the scene is easier for girls coming through now.

"I would say there was a much tougher and probably a more toxic environment when I was in it, without going into too much of that. But it was up to me to carry on and find my own way. Looking back now you see how resilient younger people can be. It is changing. Jessi Miley Dyer, we went to Tahiti together in our teens, is now the head of competition of the world surfing league. There's better prize money for women. Those things really make a difference to surfing culture."

Family tradition

The family tradition helped her to persevere. She grew up with a clatter of cousins who were all mad into surfing. When she was drawn to the lure of big waves, made possible by the advent of jet-skis to tow the surfers onto the breaks, she developed what she terms "a lovely partnership" with her cousin Neil, who was among the first to surf the notorious and celebrated break at Mullaghmore, which becomes vast and breathtaking in storm season.

Big wave surfing is, in the best sense, crazy. The adrenaline rush is obvious. It’s a rarefied pursuit because most people, even reasonable surfers, are incapable of surfing those slabs.

Over the past 20 years, it has moved from the extreme to the mainstream, with big wave specialists trekking pressure fronts much like weather geeks chase tornadoes through the American interior. The footage is online within hours and the scale of the surfer against the vast wall of water is always breathtaking. You wonder if there isn’t a grand folly at the heart of it all.

“Well, yeah, you can argue that as it grows it becomes commercialised and an element of chasing storms and swells at almost any cost. So it can’t help but feel a bit extractive. The other side is that when you are experiencing it – and I think this is the primary motivation for most big wave surfers – is this sense of intense connection to nature that is just so powerful and going to the edge of human limits in a space that is completely beyond your control – beyond human control.

“But there is that dark side in that everyone has either experienced it or knows someone who had a really close call – which is a near drowning experience. And there is that element you can’t control– the wave itself.”

But chasing big waves made sense to her; it was part of an inexhaustible curiosity about the ocean. Much of this comes from her upbringing. There's a strong undercurrent of gratitude running through Britton's story. She knows she was fortunate in the attitudes in which she was raised and the opportunities given, chronicling, for instance, a trip to Hawaii in 2001 with her mother NC as a pilgrimage to the home place of Rell Sunn, the revered Hawaiian surfer who had died from breast cancer three years earlier .

Her father Barry is an artist and she has acquired that passion, too. She was just ten when she attended a workshop with Pauline Bewick, the beginning of a lasting friendship and mentorship. In short, she was given every encouragement by her parents to push deeper into the creative world she was building for herself.

“Yeah it is almost like there is this parenting manual built in,” she laughs. “It’s a fine balance, isn’t it, of having this wonderful connection. I always felt my parents were in this dance between when to step in and when to step back. There is a lot of trust.

Deep appreciation

“When you experience surfing as a kid, okay, you can be supervised to a point and my dad took me in the water but there is at that moment of complete autonomy and you are pushed out on that wave and you are completely on your own and you have to figure it out. That was so valuable. The other part is: it was never taken for granted. Growing up and having the sea at your doorstep in Rossnowlagh was incredible. But there was always this deep appreciation instilled in myself and Becky-Finn, my sister. And there was always this give-back part.”

It was inevitable that the sea would feature in her working life. Britton’s academic work involves the study of the multiple health benefits of the sea. One of the unexpected fringe benefits of the pandemic was the numbers of people who returned – or discovered – the elemental pleasure of sea swimming.

She understands how intimidating the thought of sea can be for novices: curiously, she herself has spent a lifetime trying to overcome a fear of lakes, which always feels to her like strange water.

“Because in a lake, I can’t read the current, I can’t see the bottom, my body feels different because the water is not salty,” she explains. “But then, I know people who grew up around the lakes. And that is where they feel at home.”

Britton was already well into writing Saltwater when the pandemic happened. The abrupt global pause reflected some of the questions she was asking herself, about how we live and why the sea is such an important resource for coping and escapism. And how we use our time has become a general obsession. The lockdown and abandonment of established western patterns of life – the office life, the commuter life, the never-switching-off life – have led to those patterns coming under scrutiny as never before. Even before the pandemic, Britton had resolved to take a break from academia and has followed through on that.

“I had been at it for 10 years. I still have a foot in the door. But part of the reason is that my measure for success is how much time I get in the water and that was starting to be eroded. It was a huge risk because I had nothing lined up for myself in terms of a job. I just knew I had ‘X’ amount of months I could take time off with savings. I don’t know if I am someone who is just more comfortable when I’m in the unknown versus when everything is scheduled.”

So as the Irish winter sets in, she swims or surfs most days of the year, something she regards as both a privilege and a necessity. With the pandemic lockdown came a deluge of information on how to use free time richly, from meditation to taking walks to sea swimming. But for Britton it brought about a realisation that the reliance on personal resourcefulness can only take us so far.

“There are your own personal practices you can integrate into your life to help buffer and build resilience and support your mental health, which is important. But I think there is an overemphasis on the individual’s ‘it’s on you to get your shit together’. Whereas often it’s a real structural issue in society – if the support isn’t there or if you don’t have family, if you are in direct provision . . . It is the society we are creating that is important. That collective.”

Go to any Irish coastal spot now that is safe for swimming and you will see examples of that collective; groups out for morning or evening swims, people walking the coast. Winter surfers. A generation of Irish retirees have begun swimming in the sea for the first time. A generation of children learned to swim in salt water when the pools were closed. There’s a new awareness and a new appreciation of the coast line. It is a community thing.

And there is still an endless opportunity to escape and to be by oneself. You don’t necessarily need to dive into deepest Newfoundland.

“There is a fine line between loneliness and solitude,” Britton reasons. “They are different things. But even to feel alone, up to a point . . . there is something we maybe undervalue or brush aside, being with those uncomfortable feelings. It is something you learn as a surfer in Ireland. In order to pursue what you love doing is, most of the time, quite unpleasant. Really cold and harsh,” she laughs.

“But it is vital for me. I can’t access my creativity if I haven’t had that time. And usually out in nature, you don’t really feel alone.”

Saltwater In the Blood: Surfing, Natural Cycles and the Sea's Power to Heal by Easkey Britton is published by Watkins Publishing and is available now.