Hunting Unicorns

The perfect wave, does it exist? Finn Mullen examines the hunt in the modern age and how it can have surprising results.

- Finn Mullen

“We’re just travelling around,” said the antipodean surfer. He was on the road with his girlfriend, just looking for waves in a remote corner of Europe. It was a distinctly average day surf wise, but the wind battered waves were worth staring at just in case they changed, but no matter how hard we looked, they didn’t. His girlfriend’s gaze was fixed elsewhere, engrossed in a Sherlock Holmes book, she lounged with an air of indifference on the back seat of their rusting VW. “Where’s good today?” he asked. I resisted the urge to say ‘it’s elementary’. “Here,” I laughed. It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear but he smiled, nodding his head. ‘Just travelling’ has its ups and downs. If what he was searching for was just waves, he’d found them, but he wasn’t settling for average, there had to be something better. In his mind, the perfect score lay just round a corner. A map of Ireland lay open on the dashboard; the convoluted coastline with endless bays and craggy points is a surf explorer’s dream. Like a sailor being lured to the rocks by the siren’s call, I could see his mind urging him to find that elusive perfect wave; it was out there surely. In my mind, today at least, he was hunting unicorns. He sighed and accepted reality, sanguine to his plight. He’d come to Ireland to surf the perfect waves that are peddled in magazines, websites and videos. They exist, as they do in many parts of the world, it’s just in real time you can’t the filter out the sub-perfect or fast-forward through imperfections; the journey to perfection is longer than skipping through the analogue pages of print or the instant score of a click on the www. But in our modern world, is it becoming easier or harder to manage our expectations of perfection and the process of finding it?

Park life