WATCH: Scottish surfer Ben Larg rides giant waves in Ireland

Since then, Larg has gone on to carve out an impressive career as a professional big wave surfer, signing a contract with action sports brand Red Bull in 2022; and earlier this month, almost exactly five years on from that life-changing moment at Mullaghmore, he returned to the place where he first made a name for himself, chasing yet another super-sized swell.

Whereas he was towed into his famous 2019 wave by a jetski, however, this time he set out to catch waves under his own steam.

“This was the first time I’d ever paddled Mullaghmore,” he says over the phone from his home on the Isle of Tiree. “I got a few tow waves and a few paddle waves.”

Tow-in surfing makes it easier for surfers to catch giant waves, as they are able to begin each ride travelling at speed and already standing up. Conventional surfing, by contrast, requires the surfer to generate forward momentum using their own paddle-power, then jump to their feet as they drop down the wave face. Unsurprisingly, surfing giant waves in this way tends to carry a higher risk of injury.

“I got pretty flogged out there,” says Larg, although thankfully he came through the session uninjured. “On one of the waves I fell just before the really heavy bit where it starts breaking, and I got pushed super-deep. There’s this sort of ledge at Mullaghmore and if you get carried over it then you get pushed down over the other side, so that’s what happened – I felt myself sinking after a little while, so I was like ‘oh no, this is not good.’”

Larg almost didn’t make it to Ireland in time for the giant swell which hit Mullaghmore on Saturday 19 October. “I was actually at the Bristol Wave doing a training camp for young kids with [pro surfers] Jordi Smith and Johanne Defay,” he says. “I asked my manager, ‘can I go to Ireland for the swell at Mullaghmore?’ and he was like, ‘OK, on you go then’, so I kind of skived off. On the Saturday morning I got a 3am flight from Bristol to Dublin, drove straight from Dublin to Mullaghmore, and I was surfing by ten. So yeah – it was a pretty hectic day, but it was worth it.”

Such is the life of the professional big wave surfer. “You can never really plan anything in surfing,” says Larg. “You can kind of plan your year, and you’ve got a rough idea of where you might be, but it’s chaos – sort-of organised chaos.”

Earlier in October, Larg and his Australian tow-in partner Ned Hart were at a different big wave spot in Ireland – the notorious slab called Riley’s near Lahinch in County Clare. The waves here might not have been as big as those at Mullaghmore when measured from peak-to-trough, but if anything they were more dangerous, due both to the shallowness of the water and the remoteness of the location.

“I think the swell was about 12-14 feet with a 16-20 second period,” says Larg, “so that just translates into massive surf. There were 10-15ft faces, but even though that doesn’t sound so big, at that wave in particular it’s just so shallow and so heavy that it’s a different sort of size – it’s really more about how wide it breaks.”

“The locals were saying it wasn’t necessarily the biggest ever at Riley’s, but maybe the most gnarly. It was all over the place.”

The approach to Riley’s by land involves climbing down a huge cliff, then traversing a slippery, treacherous reef; however, Larg and Hart were using a jetski to tow each other into waves, so getting to the spot was even harder.

“To get the skis in there,” says Larg, “you’re driving for 20 minutes around this huge headland, and in a big swell you’re going in and out of these massive troughs. Then there’s this little gully in the rock you have to shoot through before you get to Riley’s. You can drive all the way round the headland, but to cut time there’s this gap in the rock. Obviously when there’s a mad swell running you’ve got to time it right and hopefully make it through to the other side.”

Once they reached the break, Larg and Hart thought long and hard before attempting to catch a wave, due to the magnitude of the swell.

“We almost called it off,” says Larg, “but we hung around and watched it for about an hour and then Ned was like, ‘Right, I’ll get a couple of waves.’ I towed him onto one and then we pretty much never stopped after that. The boys on the beach were all like ‘Naa, we’re not surfing, this is too crazy’, but they jumped in for a few after that.”

One of the surfers who came out to join Larg and Hart that day was Hawaiian big wave expert Nathan Florence, brother of three-time world champion John John, who Larg has surfed with previously on the north coast of Scotland. In the YouTube video he released shortly after the session, he described conditions as “huge... awesome, and scary”. As a general rule, if the Hawaiians are calling it scary, it probably is.

To follow Ben Larg’s adventures, check out his Instagram, @BenLarg

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