Strangford Lough/Surfing Weather Watchers with Barra Best - Shorts

Strangford Lough in County Down.

It's beautiful in all seasons.

Especially in autumn, when tens of thousands of brent geese take

advantage of tailwinds to carry them from their summer breeding

grounds in Canada to their winter retreat in Ireland.

I've come to Castle Espie to meet up with John McCulloch,

and to see these remarkable birds for myself.

This is a lovely little sheltered bay here.

It's got plenty of eelgrass in it.

This sort of green stuff that you can see, Barra?

This is what they're here to eat.

So this bay holds quite a few brent geese.

When the tide's coming in, you'll get them

flying over this pier here, and they'll drop in here.

It's a massive number of the birds that come here.

Yeah, completely significant.

I mean, brent geese put Strangford Lough on the map.

This is why this area is so protected.

Because you're really talking about the nearly entire

world's population of this bird,

that comes here. It's extremely significant.

They might be small, but these birds have made

an incredible 2,500 mile journey to reach our shores.

They're really relying on a strong northwesterly wind to get here.

Oh, very much so.

If the wind is blowing in the wrong direction on migration,

they'll not move. There's no point. They've only so much energy.

So what they need is northwesterlies.

If you can imagine, they're in the Arctic,

they need to be pushed from behind.

They're not going to fly into any southerlies coming up, because why?

You'll expend so much energy.

How long will they stay here once they arrive?

Well, they arrive in the autumn.

And they'll stay right through the winter.

And then when we hit about April, May,

what we would consider hopefully to be springtime here,

they're going to be turning round and they're going to be

heading back up towards the Arctic.

They need a good northwesterly wind to get here, so I suppose

they're looking for a good southeasterly wind to blow back?

Exactly.

It's actually even potentially more hazardous on the return,

because you've probably got the female bird, they've bred,

the male's got to look after her.

So they want everything to be perfect on their way back.

-That's them just out there?

-Yeah.

Just in a big raft there. Now that the tide's fully in,

the birds can't reach the eelgrass below them.

So they'll actually just go and float out to sea.

And generally just have a snooze.

-They just chill on the water until they can feed again?

-That's it.

All it is is sleeping and feeding. That's it.

Five hours of doing nothing, floating on the water?

-Sound perfect, doesn't it?

-Sounds great, doesn't it?

There's plenty of truth in the saying that a bird in the hand

is worth two in the bush.

And I'm going to attempt to get up close, nose to beak,

with the resident geese.

I think we've got somebody a little bit hungry.

Absolutely magnificent bird.

It's weird, you kind of expect them to bite your hand.

No biting the hand that feeds you now!

No? No more, all done?

As evening falls over Strangford Lough, the brent geese feed

and settle down for the night in their winter home.

Also, thanks to the Gulfstream, the north coast of Ireland picks up

consistent amounts of Atlantic swell.

People say to me, "Barra, I remember summer last year.

"It was on a Tuesday!"

We have some of the best beaches in Europe, but it's very rare that

someone feels brave or optimistic enough to go into the sea.

But one man who's not afraid to look into the eye of the storm

is big-wave surfer Al Mennie.

Al has surfed all over the world in search of that perfect wave.

And weather is the hinge on which surfing depends.

A surfing globetrotter Al may be,

but he caught his first wave closer to home.

I got into surfing through being on the beach at Castlerock.

At the age of nine, my brother and I surfed.

Mum and Dad, we've always had boats in the family,

and that sort of thing. So it seemed normal to be in the sea, you know?

And when lots of people think of surfing,

they picture Australia, they picture California.

But we have people coming from all around the world to surf

here on the north coast and along the west coast.

Yeah, we have excellent waves here.

It's colder here, obviously, and it's wild in the winter.

But we do have very good waves.

But when you're thinking about surfing,

you're looking at systems around the globe, almost?

Yeah, in order for us to get surf here on the north coast, we need

weather to happen in other parts of the world to send those waves to us.

There's a misconception where people think, it's really

windy by the sea today, it'll be really good waves for surfing.

That's not how it is, that's not the kind of waves we look for.

In particular, I look for these storms,

these deep depressions starting to form down in the Atlantic,

over towards the Caribbean.

Believe it or not, if we see hurricanes down there,

we're sitting here going,

there's going to be waves in 7-10 days, sort of thing.

Al's taking me around the coast now to check out

a few of his favourite surfing spots.

What's the highest wave you've surfed off the coast of Ireland?

Probably over 60 feet.

Impressive. Was that during a storm of some sort?

Yeah, that was actually back in 2008.

At the time, it was the biggest recorded swell in the Atlantic.

All this technology, we can see all the different swells

and the wind forecast and everything coming together,

and they can predict where the waves are coming to.

And sometimes, Al finds big waves in unexpected locations.

# Lady, running down to the riptide

# Taken away to the dark side

# I want to be your left-hand man. #

And sometimes it's Al who provides the photo opportunity.

We're at the Giant's Causeway,

one of our most popular tourist destinations, to see all the rocks.

But you like to come here to surf. How dangerous is it?

This is one of the most dangerous places you can go surfing,

and I would not advise it to anybody.

It is dangerous here, because of all the rocks in particular.

It just gets battered here,

it's an extremely rough, wild part of the coast.

And these are the charts that you use to figure out where to go?

This is an Admiralty chart, it shows the depth of the ocean

and various currents and various things on it.

If you look on here, this is where we are at the minute, just here.

I look at the depth of the sea, and then

I look at what direction we're going to get our swell, things like that.

So if you imagine, I'm sitting out here normally.

On a big day, I'd be sitting around here, where we are,

I'm looking for a big storm way up in the North Atlantic.

Way, way up there.

So the winds are kept away from us, it's all crazy chaos out there.

And it pushes these swells in towards the coast, like that.

And then locally, we've got local weather system,

which is giving us light offshore winds, that's ideal.

-They push off against the swell, clean it all up.

-Smoothing out the waves.

Smoothing it out. And if you look here, we've got these massive cliffs.

They kill the wind, so if it's a really strong, windy day,

for example, say it's 25mph wind, that big cliff

will knock that wind out of it, so it could be down to ten.

So in here it can be nice and smooth and clean,

despite out here being very rough.

Al's enthusiasm is infectious.

And I certainly wasn't going to let

one of the best surfers in the world go without a lesson.

# I got knocked down

# But I'll get up

# I got knocked down

# But I'll get up

# I got knocked down...

OK, it isn't a 60 foot wave,

but it's still a huge achievement for me.

# I got knocked down

# But I'll get up. #