About Rossnowlagh Surf School

The Beginning
James Garvey Grew up surfing this beach from 4 years old, he surfed for Ireland at European and World level sponsored by Billabong. After school he travelled the world surfing, and in 2014 he chose to drop out of business collage and founded Rossnowlagh Surf School with a loan of 20 beaten up surfboards from his old boss. He had a dream and with help from a few amazing surfing buddies, that dream became a reality, and the first surf lesson was given in May 2014

Growing the Team
After livin’ the dream for 2 years, spending all our time we were not doing lessons surfing ourselves and feeding our hunger for travelling to the best most remote surf spots in the world. We would always land home to a growing surfing community and with the support from our amazing local community we started to grow our amazing team.

James achieved his ISA level 2 advanced level coaching certification. This is when RSS expanded to offer intermediate & advanced surfing lessons. Finally able and share all the professional coaching received from some of Europe's top surf coaches, and even training at the Surfing HPC Centre in Australia.

We started getting noticed
Our Team was Killing it, Our Love for sharing the art of surfing was getting us noticed and we wanted to develop our training, offerings and dreams.

We focused on our ethos and on the importance of making our surfing lessons accessible to all. This naturally led to us developing our inclusion programmes, learning and developing in house training to surf with those most in need.

We were recognised as one of the Top Surf schools in Europe and we had grown a beautiful community of supporters worldwide.

Covid brought the world to a standstill during the winter, Naturally we still find time to live the dream and we were surfing deep in Mexican jungle - We flew back to Ireland to a country in lockdown.

We live streamed the sunset on the beach every night on our socials, for those who couldn't be there. When restrictions lifted, we experienced our most successful summer to date.

More People discovered the ocean's incredible healing powers, through surfing with us. That year, The Irish Times named us one of the best summer camps in Ireland.

Award Recognition
James Garvey Owner & Manager of Rossnowlagh Surf School was named as The Entrepreneur Of The Year 2025 by Letterkenny Chamber of Commerce. We continued to focus on building a coaching pathway so people can not just learn to surf, but actually commit to learning the art of surfing.

We practiced more of our ethos to give back and began an annual tradition of a marathon paddle from Sleive League to Bundoran (over 40k) to raise money for counselling services in Bundoran.

We will always continue to give back to our community and those most in need, growing once again our inclusion part of our business

James Caught a few waves to celebrate- Here he is paddling a beauty at one of the most respected big waves on the planet, its our local, Mullaghmore

Today & Tomorrow
We celebrated our 10th & 11th year of livin’ this no longer little dream. We continue as a leading Surf School in Europe and continue to innovate and expand our programs while focusing on building and giving back our incredible community - Come join us on this Journey !!