Sub-zero temperatures, snow falling from the sky, windscreens and roads frozen over, ferocious winds battering the coast of Ireland and wild, thickset lips detonating on its shores — to surf Mullaghmore at size in the middle of winter you’ve got to be hard as bloody nails. A bit like Andrew Cotton and Hugo Vau, then. Cotty gets plunged so deep by one wild, thickset lip that his ears pop and his nose starts to bleed, but the pain and the cold and the bloody nose and the popped ear drums are all worth it in the end, for the following day he gets spat out of a pit he’ll remember for the rest of his life.