Spending Hours Chasing Seconds: Finn Richardson’s Story
We recently welcomed Finn Richardson to the C-Skins team. At 21 years of age Finn already has multiple Irish junior titles to his name, however he is so much more than a contest surfer. An eloquent young man who none-the-less lets his surfing do the talking, he’s fast making a name for himself afresh on the big, heavy, and slabby waves of Ireland’s west coast. This is his story so far.
Header photo and above by Oscar James
Finn’s surfing story starts early: When he was four years old his parents headed off on a trip around Asia and Australia, and it was in Australia that Finn was pushed into his first wave. It’s one of his earliest memories. They brought that surfboard, a 5’2” foamie, back home with them to Ireland where his Dad continued his ocean education taking him out at Lahinch and pushing him into waves. Finn still has that surfboard in his garage.
“When I was 8 years old, my dad got the opportunity to work in the Canary Islands.” Finn recalls. “He was a pilot flying for RyanAir at the time, and they opened up a new base in Lanzarote and offered for him to transfer down there, and he took it. A couple of months before, my parents had bought a second hand camper van. I was in school and they came and picked me up after school in the camper van and said “we’re going for a trip, hop in”, and that was the last I saw of Ireland for a little while.”
The family drove down through France, Spain and Portugal, turning the journey into an elongated surf trip, before catching the ferry to the Canary Islands from Cadiz. Their first home on Lanzarote was on a part of the island where there weren’t really many waves, but on a day trip out to Famara on the island’s northwest coast the seeds for Finn’s surfing future were sown.
“I was surfing at Famara beach, and I remember seeing this kid and he had a shortboard, a hardboard, and I remember because I hadn’t started surfing a hardboard yet, I was still on a foamie. It was tiny. It was a 4’’4” Clayton, blue, and I went over and was talking to him and saying that I’d never seen a surfboard so small, made for a kid, and we ended up hitting it off. His name was Max Miller, an English kid, and he still lives in Lanzarote now and I’m still really good friends with him.” Max gave Finn his phone number, and Finn stuck it to his fridge where it stayed for a year, until his parents moved the family up to Famara, into a house right above the beach.
“My dad loved it. It’s a really nice, small, fishing village, it’s not super touristy, and there’s loads of waves. There’re reef breaks, slabs, and the beach is amazing. It’s a surfer’s paradise, and a grom’s dream.” Finn and Max reconnected and became best friends, with Finn falling in with a group of lads who included Max and his new neighbours Conor and Dylan Donegan (Dylan is the current ISA World Junior champion). Finn began training with a small group of groms under the guidance of Brazilian surf coach Gustavo Barreto, known as Magoo. The team would train three to four times each week, but Finn was surfing every single day.
“I remember I had to do extra maths tuition. I was terrible at maths. Our house looked down on the beach, you came out of the gate and you’re on the sand. It’d maybe take 25 or 30 seconds to reach the shoreline. I remember being in the water and my maths tutor would be waiting for me in the house and my mother would come out, she’s a pure Irish mammy, with a pot and pan and start banging it on the shoreline to get me in. From that she bought a whistle and that was how she’d get me out of the water for my maths lessons.”
Under Magoo’s guidance, the team of groms from Famara blossomed. “He taught the core fundamentals of surfing very well. He wasn’t doing video analysis back then, it was mechanics and tactics, and he made it work. I improved extremely quickly with him.” Finn, Max, Conor and Dylan started competing on the Canarian circuit of surf comps, but it was a little while before Finn realised that there was a parallel junior circuit back in Ireland. “By the time I realised, I had missed the first three or four comps of the year,” Finn remembers, “but there were two comps left and I went back and I did my first ever Irish comp. I did terribly! I don’t think I even made it through one round!” He returned to Lanzarote and resolved to go back next year to do the whole series, and to do as well as he could. Finn put his head down and trained hard, and when he returned the next year he had a clean enough sweep that, at age 12, he won the national U14 junior title. The 2016 C-Skins West Coast Juniors surf contest at Finn’s old home break of Lahinch was the final event on the junior tour to select Ireland’s surf team for the European Junior Championships, where Finn was also presented with a surfboard by visiting Hawaiian pro Jamie O’Brien for the improvement he had shown at contests over the past year.
Finn won the title again the next year, and went to Morocco to represent Ireland at the ISA Euro Surf event. The following year he moved into the U18 division, won another Irish junior title and went to Santa Cruz in Portugal for the Euros again. “I never did as well as I wanted to in the Euros. I always felt like there was way more pressure than any other competition I’d surfed in,” Finn says of his time representing Ireland. “It was always amazing to go and represent Ireland and meet people from other teams. In Portugal I entered the bodyboarding division too because Ireland didn’t have a second bodyboarder, so I volunteered for that and ended up doing better in the bodyboard competition than in the surfing. I think I got to the quarterfinals!”
At the same time as he was experiencing competitive success, Finn was also starting to develop a taste for heavy waves, first paddling out at Lanzarote’s premier slab El Quemo when he was just twelve years old. “I didn’t always have a taste for it,” he explains, “But once I was exposed to it at quite a young age, it was something that I transitioned into quite naturally and that I quickly started to enjoy.” Following in the path of his friend Max’s older brother Fynnlee Miller and his friends, Finn quickly went from “messing about surfing the beach” to tackling heavy, heavy waves. “Once I got a taste for it I realised that if I fell and got a beating that I’d pop up and survive it, so I’d paddle back out, and it got easier and easier from there.”
Photo by Oscar James
Finn’s run of national titles and trips to represent Ireland at the Euro’s came to a halt when the COVID pandemic hit and competitions were put on hold, and then in 2021 Finn’s family left Lanzarote and moved back to Ireland. He had his last year of school to finish, before going to college in Limerick – landlocked and a decent drive from the coast and the waves. It wasn’t just competitive surfing that ground to a halt for Finn, but surfing altogether. Without surfing, Finn followed the path of a lot of young adults and found distraction in partying. “I didn’t surf for almost three years. It wasn’t until I had this massive anxiety that I had let it all slip away and that was it, it was gone and there was no point in trying, that I realised what I had had. I had a really bad outlook on the whole thing.”
Then, out of the blue, Finn’s got a call from Scottish big wave charger Ben Larg. Ben had moved into the house next-door to Finn in Famara when he was 15, and they had become really good friends. Ben was driving from Scotland down to Nazare, and asked Finn if he wanted to jump in for the ride. Finn said yes, flew down to France, and got in the van with Ben. He paddled out for his surf in a few years, and it all came flooding back. It hadn’t gone anywhere.
“I came back to Ireland after that trip, and it was coming towards the end of winter. I’m working now, I’m making a bit of money, so I decided to put my head down, work, not drink, save my money and buy a quiver and give it my all. I decided to surf my fucking heart out and do it for me, and do it for the craic, because when I went back surfing it was a totally different feeling. It was giving me something that is hard to explain. I was smiling putting my wetsuit on, smiling walking down to the waves, smiling while I was paddling out. I was unbelievably happy. Surfing was filling this void that I’d been feeling for the past couple of years.”
Photo by Oscar James
Finn ordered a quiver from a shaper friend in Lanzarote, Yeray Garcia, and when winter rolled around he was ready and willing. “I paddled out at Mully and my first ever session there I didn’t get a good wave. I paddled for a mid-size one, nose dived straight away and ate shit. I got pushed down the line and was nailed on the head right in the death bowl section where you don’t want to be. It sent me I don’t know how many feet down into the depths. My ears were ringing, my eyes felt like they were going to blow up, but that’s what I needed. I needed that absolute beating to reassure me. I popped back up, I was breathing, and somebody came and rescued me on a ski.” After surviving that drubbing at Mullaghmore, Finn went on to have a good winter of waves, scoring sessions at The Cliffs of Moher and Riley’s.
When asked about the similarities and differences between surfing in Lanzarote and Ireland, Finn thinks for a minute: “There is quite a big similarity in heaviness, and rawness. When you look at Ireland you think of cold, and raw, and wet. In Lanzarote it ain’t wet and it isn’t cold, but it is raw, although it’s got a different type of rawness. It’s volcanic; there’s rock everywhere. It is a raw place. I haven’t been anywhere else in the world that’s like Lanzarote.”
Finn was surfing El Quemo, a spot dubbed the “European Pipeline” from a very young age, which equipped him with the skills for what was to come in Ireland. But as well as the technical ability and confidence in waves of consequence, since moving back to Ireland Finn’s also had to get used to surfing in the cold much more often because, as he puts it, “the waves are only good when it’s fucken cold.” Ireland makes a surfer work for their waves, in commitment, cold, and the walk to get to the best waves.
Finn’s now qualified as an aircraft engineer and is living back in County Clare, a place that he values not only for the quality and variety of waves, but for the amazing community of surfers there: “That’s the most special thing about County Clare for me - the local homegrown chargers that it produces, many of them unknown. Especially, I have to give a shout out to the bodyboarders, because they paved the way at many slabs that are now surfed by surfers. So I always have massive respect for them.” Whilst a lot of those slabs are now household names, the coast of County Clare still holds many secrets close to its chest and under its towering cliffs, and there are still hard-to-reach spots that are yet to be pioneered.
“This winter I’ve teamed up with one of my best mates Callum Curtin, and we just bought a second-hand jet ski and we have a few plans. For the most part it’s just going to be towing, and surfing some waves that people don’t really surf. When certain spots are good there are others that I think will be good but they’re a lot of effort because you can only get there on a ski so nobody goes to the bother of trying to reach them. You could be out there with your best mate getting barrelled.”
When it comes to hunting down new waves and charging, Finn is the first to say that he doesn’t have to look very far for inspiration. Being surrounded by and friends with humble chargers like Conor Maguire, Ollie O’Flaherty and Gearóid Mcdaid and Clare’s solid crew of underground chargers, as well as incredible water athletes like in-water photographer and filmmaker João Tudella or bodyboarder Thomas Gillespie, is driving Finn’s desire to get off the map and into heavy waves for the sheer joy of the chase. “There’s just a really good crew of guys who are pushing it, who are core, and who are in it for the love of it.” He says, “And that’s what I love – having an amazing session with the lads and getting pitted out of my mind and then going back to the pub for a chowder and a pint, and chatting, and having a craic. There’s nothing better than that.”
And if surfing slabs and spannering aeroplanes doesn’t work out, then Finn’s always got the option of following his grandfather into the traditional matchmaking game – something we got to find out about when we asked about all of the donkeys and the shed full of signs that appear occasionally on his Instagram: “The shed is my grandfather’s shed.” He explained. “I’m really close to my grandfather and I spend quite a bit of time up in his cottage. My grandfather is a bit of a local legend… he’s Ireland’s last traditional matchmaker, so he’s like tinder but for back in the day when there was no tinder. That’s his shed, and he’s got a matchmaking museum and a donkey farm. So he’s got all his trinkets and all of these old carts, gypsy carts and wedding carts and different stuff he’s amassed over his lifetime. And then he’s got his little donkey-petting farm. The donkeys are round the back of his cottage there. Every year during the winter he’ll make these signs and then come summer time he gets me to drive around with him in his little Toyota Corolla, and he’ll stop in the middle of the road and get me to stick in the sign or screw them onto telephone poles – they’re just signs to direct people to his donkey farm and his museum.”
Talking with Finn, it’s easy to forget that he’s only just getting going on his twenties. He’s already achieved more with his surfing, and surfed more waves of consequence, than most of us who ride waves, and he seems to have no intention to ease off the gas. He’s found his calling, and found his people, and we couldn’t be prouder to be backing him in his corner.
“There’s surfers everywhere and they’re some of the best bunch of people. That’s one of the things I love about it. You’ll find your people. People that are crazy enough to spend hours and hours chasing seconds.”
Cheers, Finn.
