Photo: Gearoud McDaid // YouTube
Riley’s is one of the scariest waves in the world. Located just south of Lahinch, on Ireland’s west coast, the wave produces a monstrous, emerald-green tube, thundering over an extremely shallow reef.
“Riley’s is such a fucking hectic wave, innit?” mused Gearoid McDaid, in his most recent video of an all-time session he had at the spot, alongside Noah Lane and Conor Maguire. “It’s mad that you’re there on the perfect three-foot small days, getting perfect tubes across the rock, and then you’re going down all these other big days trying to tow and it just doesn’t make sense how the place is surfable. Bone-dry close outs and you’re just like, ‘There’s no way it’s possible.’
“But there’s those days that everything does come together. There’s perfect waves breaking across the rock. Luckily, we somehow managed to score a couple of those days. This was one of those days that everything came together, and we scored all day. It was pretty sick.”