MAKING WAVES
Surfer Easkey Britton has spent her elif in a male-dominated sport and has some advice for women who want to be heard
She has tackled some of the world’s scariest waves and excelled in a maledominated sport. So it seems surprising that five-time Irish national surfing champion Dr Easkey Britton, 31, might have similar fears and frustrations as the rest of us.
And long before journalling became a trendy thing to do, young Easkey was furiously jotting her thoughts and feelings into a notebook as she travelled the world competing and ‘racking up a massive carbon footprint’.
‘Whenever my head feels too cluttered I find when you put it out on paper it makes more sense,’ she says.
Now this pioneering sportswoman hosts a Women’s Storytelling Workshop next weekend in the Model, Sligo, as part of the surfing festival Shore Shots. There she will ‘create a space where women can feel comfortable enough to access their own voices and give expression to them.
‘It came about after Shore Shots last year as a way to try and break that socalled barrier to women’s voices being heard; why we weren’t hearing stories from a woman’s perspective.’
Easkey believes women need to give ourselves the time and space to reflect on what we want to say — and then find a way to say it.
‘It doesn’t serve us well any more to make ourselves small and hold back,’ she says. ‘We need more voices speaking up. I don’t think anyone else is going to do it for us. What I hope women will get out of this workshop is learning how to better listen to ourselves.’
Easkey is soft-spoken, quick to laugh and speaks in a thoughtful rather than a crusading way. She is as academic as she is athletic, and is a marine social scientist with a PhD in environment and society from the University of Ulster.
Now a postdoctoral researcher at NUI Galway, she is working on a project called NEAR Health, about ‘how we can connect people in society with health and wellbeing benefits of nature. It feeds into who I am very strongly, which is nice.’
Easkey grew up overlooking the beach in Rossnowlagh, Co Donegal, where her family owned the Sandhouse Hotel.
The eldest of two daughters, her very appropriate name comes from the Irish word for fish, éisc, and she is called after Easkey in Sligo, a place renowned for surfing.
Her grandmother Mary Britton, who ran the hotel in her day, was ‘quite the enterprising businesswoman’ and brought the very first surfboards to Ireland. ‘She ➤
There’s always a gender dynamic in surfing, you can feel a bit on the outside
➤ saw surfing in California and it inspired her to get two surfboards sent over,’ reveals Easkey. ‘ There was no surfing in Ireland at the time.
‘She had five boys and when something like that arrives, they’re obviously going to be curious. Surfing was very experimental in those days – and there were no wetsuits. The boys got hooked on it.’
No one more so than Easkey’s father Barry and, later, her mum NC. They taught their eldest daughter to surf when she was just four years old.
‘I started competing when I was about eight because the surf club at Rossnowlagh had events. The surf club was where we all hung out as kids. The motivation evolved when I thought I could get on the Irish surf team and travel.
‘It was my way to travel out of Donegal and into the world,’ she says, of surfing destinations like Hawaii, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil.
‘It’s been amazing to see the world and to be in the sea in all these different parts of the world. But I’ve been in enough places to know my favourite place is Ireland.’
Despite the freezing cold Atlantic sea? ‘I think that’s maybe part of the appeal, which sounds crazy,’ she says, adding: ‘Wetsuits have gotten much better.’ But not every surfer likes to compete. ‘Dad wasn’t interested in contests at all. Surfing is strange that way and increasingly it’s that way for me. When you’re surfing as a way of life it’s almost like you’re seeking the opposite qualities to competition: freedom to be creative and artistic, freedom from rules. When I was competing full-time I was in danger of losing the joy or passion for it sometimes. It became a bit more like work.’
It also sounds like it had its lonely moments, despite the glamour of visiting exotic places.
‘I guess being a woman in surfing has taught me to be really comfortable being alone which is a healthy quality. It’s an individual pursuit when you’re on your own in the waves. Socially it’s a really great mix but it’s very male- dominated. It can be difficult. There’s always that gender dynamic. You can feel a bit on the outside.’
She takes a deep breath when asked if she experienced sexism in the sport.
‘I guess it’s probably more subtle than overt a lot of the time. It comes down to not getting the same opportunities or representation in the media or platform for stories. Then there’s sexualisation and objectification in terms of the images of women in surfing. There’s a massive pay gap in terms of doing it as an athlete. There are so many pioneering women that you don’t hear about.’
In 2013, Easkey became the first woman to surf in Iran – and French filmmaker Marion Poizeau shot a short documentary about it for France Ô TV station.
The two women travelled to the country’s southernmost city of Chabahar, on the border of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman.
‘I chose to surf covered up that first time, which I think was in a way an important game changer that allowed other women to surf. Straight off the bat it showed that women could do it and that it was accessible regardless of whether you were a Muslim woman or not. It made it harder for them to say no,’ she explains. ‘Now it’s very much established as a sport in the country and women are very involved in it.’
That same year Easkey gave a Tedx talk in Dublin about the power of surfing to ‘heal and connect people’. She laughs when I tell her the first thing I noticed were her incredibly toned arms from paddling out on her board to catch waves. ‘My body is definitely a good reflection of my life,’ she says.
At that Tedx event she said ‘the ocean doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman’. She argued that there isn’t a lack of female role models in her sport – they just don’t get the same publicity.
Easkey herself is the best known female surfer in Ireland, thanks to her combination of skill, success and, it has to be said, photogenic looks.
‘But I’ve also recognised it wasn’t an easy process for myself,’ she says. ‘Basically the workshop was born of my own experience and I will be sharing how I deal with fears, how I work
through my own creative blocks. I think it’s good for women to open up more about that and talk about the hard stuff and the challenging stuff. Because I think sometimes we can have a mask on, pretending everything is great.’
She also suspects women settle into roles society expects of us without always questioning whether or not they are satisfying. ‘I think a lot of the time we follow these scripts that aren’t true to who we are and we tend not to question it. That’s partly because of not having the time and space to reflect on it. We also maybe tend to conform to the expectations we think other people have about us. I’m interested in finding a way to be able to let go of those expectations other people have. So we can be more daring with expressing who we are.’
Easkey divides her time between Donegal and her work in NUIG, where she rents a room near Galway bay. She tries to get into the sea every day, whether to surf in Rossnowlagh or just for a wetsuit-free plunge with brave souls in Salthill.
Currently single she says ‘my only full-time relationship is with the sea. That will always be the case. I don’t see that as a problem. I don’t see it as a problem for anyone else either!’
Despite her love of the water, has she ever felt scared? ‘Yes. Quite regularly I definitely feel scared, that’s part of the appeal really: being confronted with your own fears. You need to be as prepared as you can be physically and mentally but the unexpected will still happen. My own surfboard is the greatest hazard, I’ve been hit on the head a few times,’ she admits, and she needed stitches once after crashing into a reef. ‘But surfing injuries are not so bad compared to other extreme sports. The injury rate is actually quite low.’
The image of surfers being bronzed, blonde, slightly dim guys like actor Matthew McConaughey in 2008 movie Surfer Dude is not a stereotype that exists here as much as places like California.
‘I think in Ireland it goes back again to the climate. The conditions are so tough, raw and wild that if you want to surf and buy into this cool lifestyle you’ll get a rude awakening.’
Presumably if you surf in Ireland, you might experience four seasons in one wave.
‘I think that’s part of the dramatic beauty. There will be cinematic scenes when you’re caught in squall or getting hailstones on you in the water. But there’s a sense of these fleeting moments being very precious. Like the sun, you want to drop everything and make the most of it when it’s there. It’s the same with waves.’
When asked what the highlights of her career have been, she says, ‘Funnily enough one is actually a wave; this wave I caught in Mullaghmore headline in Sligo a couple of winters ago. It’s one of the biggest waves I’ve surfed.’
A video of her surfing this wall of water, shot by her younger sister Becky-Finn and uploaded to YouTube, was entered in the 2014 Ride of the Year Billabong XXL Big Wave Awards.
‘A wave only really lasts 30 seconds and the speed of this one was just incredibly fast.’
In that spirit of seizing the moment, Easkey is now stepping outside of her ‘comfort zone’ again with next weekend’s workshop.
‘What have I done?’ she jokes. ‘I’ve been writing my whole life and I’ve always kept a journal and it’s probably come along with travelling a lot by myself. It’s been a reflective process. I’m in my head quite a lot so it’s nice to have a brain dump on to the page.’
She doesn’t like to use the word empowerment ‘because what it means to be empowered is such a personal thing’. But what she wants to do today is ‘to encourage a more explorative mindset, one that’s okay with taking risks.
‘A lot of women and girls feel they shouldn’t do anything until they’re really ready – and society encourages it. But nearly everything I’ve done in life I’ve never felt ready. So it’s that idea of being okay with just going for it even when you don’t feel 100 per cent prepared.’
So take a leaf out of Easkey’s book – and plunge in.
SHORE SHOTS, the fifth annual Irish Surfing Festival, takes place on April 22-23. Visit shoreshots.ie for details