AJ O'Sullivan, an instructor at the Delphi Mountain Resort, describes his day to
SANDRA O'CONNELL
I LIVE 15 MINUTES from Delphi Mountain Resort, in Louisburgh, Co Mayo. The instructors share houses there, and we pool lifts.
We get up at around 8am and get to the centre before 9am for a staff meeting. That’s when we find out about the groups we have coming for the day, what times you’re supposed to be where and what equipment you’ll need,
By 9.30am I’ll head over to the sports hall to collect my group and pick up the equipment. We get a mix of school kids, corporate groups looking for team-building exercises and day trippers.
I like the kids’ groups best. You get a bunch of transition-year students and they practically entertain themselves. With the corporate groups it can get very competitive. The very big companies like to give points and keep scores, so things can get very heated, but we just stand back and smile.
What’s great is that the office bigwig starts off trying to take charge but quickly realises he or she is not in the office now, and, as the day progresses, stronger leaders emerge. You always get too many chiefs and not enough Indians, so it’s fun watching them sort that out.
In the morning I’ll be forest based, which means overseeing the rock tower, the high ropes and the zip line. People feel great after doing it, especially if they arrived with a fear of heights.
I’ve been doing outdoor pursuits since I was 10. I’m 23 now and due back in college, for third-year marine engineering, in Galway next month. I fit in as much adventure instruction as I can during holidays, and I like it here because there’s a great atmosphere. It’s very friendly. The scenery is just stunning, too.
For lunch we go to the staff cabin. When there are a couple of hundred kids running around it’s nice to have a quiet place to chill.
In the afternoon I’ll be on the water, doing canoeing, kayaking or raft building. Again, the raft building is a team exercise, and the real fun starts when they put it on the water to see if it floats. They mostly end up in the water trying to get their barrels back.
We finish up normally by about 5pm, with an end-of-day staff meeting to talk about how things went.
If there are kids in we’ll have evening games – maybe a hike or tag rugby indoors. In that case we finish at 10.30pm. It’s a long day, but it’s fun. Everybody visiting wants to make the most of it, and the instructors all love the outdoors.
Any time off I get is spent out mountaineering, climbing crags and the like. We work in a giant playground, and there’s always spare gear around, so any chance we have, off we go.