Ian Walsh owns two goats. Douglas and Tina. He loves them very much. I know this because he told me. According to Walsh, one of his great pleasures after returning home from a big-wave surfing odyssey is to feed his beloved goats. When you measure your achievements in grand increments like waves the size of downtown buildings, it’s the simple things that keep you grounded.
And Walsh’s new film, Distance Between Dreams, available to the free world on iTunes today, fits right into that arc. His objective is to bring viewers into his world – the world of a big wave surfer – in a way that hasn’t been done before.
“I wanted to be able to give a viewer a sense of being there with me the entire time and to actually see what we see and feel what we feel on those really big days,” says Walsh.
And while the location list hosts several of the usual suspects that shined bright last winter like Jaws, Walsh made a concerted effort to seek out new places.
Ian Walsh, January 15 2016. Doing one his two favorite things. Photo: Clark Fyans / Red Bull Content Pool
“I just feel like it’s a really big world out there, and part of this was doing some more exploration, looking a little bit deeper and geeking out on Google Earth and finding somewhere new to go.”
In the process of that exploration, Walsh is bound to test his limits – flirting uncomfortably close with the other side of mortality. That kind of boundary-pushing is an occupational hazard for a career big wave surfer. As a consequence, Walsh maintains an intense training and nutrition regimen out of the water. Any and every psychological advantage is meaningful, because the goal, when it all comes down to it, is to come home.
“I just want to be confident in myself that I’m going to be able come home at the end of the day to see my two goats, Douglas and Tina,” says Walsh. “They’ll miss me. Who’s going to feed ’em?”
Editor’s Note: Ian Walsh’s brand new big-wave opus, Distance Between Dreams, is available for download on iTunes today. Give it a check out here.
