A Maghera teacher left the classroom to run a bike hire on the Causeway Coast and works March to October

He packed away the lesson plans and sharpened the brake cables instead, a quiet pivot that felt at once risky and inevitable. In his words, the switch was “less a leap, more a long exhale,” a choice to trade fluorescent lighting for headwinds and salt. The move took him from Maghera to the Causeway Coast, and from weekday bells to the easy chime of bike chains.

The rhythm is seasonal by design. He opens when the gorse blooms and closes when the evenings go slate-grey, working from March to October and giving winter back to rest and maintenance. “I wanted my year to have edges,” he says, grinning, “so I could see where it starts, and where it ends.”

From timetables to tide tables

In the classroom, he loved the gentle alchemy of a good explanation, the moment a student’s eyes brightened and a problem finally made sense. But the marking stacks were relentless, and the after-hours were never truly after-hours. “I was always half at work,” he says, “even when I was home and supposedly off.”

The pandemic years pressed the thought forward, and a test rental from the back of a van gave the idea its first spin. “I watched strangers roll back from a cliff-top loop with sand in their hair and windburned smiles, and I thought, I’d like my days to look like that.”

Building a business on sea breeze and spokes

He started small: six hybrids, two e-bikes, one battered toolbox, and a notebook full of tides and tricks. Location mattered, but listening mattered more. He learned where the wind flattens riders and where it lifts them, which coffee vans open early, and which farm lanes hum with bees in June.

A typical morning begins with tyre checks and chain talk, the practical ritual that keeps bodies upright and plans possible. He sets out route cards with notes like “shelter here,” “steep but short,” and “worth it for the view,” because every rider needs a tiny map of courage tucked in a pocket.

“I don’t sell bikes,” he shrugs. “I sell a few hours that feel like they belong to you.”

A seasonal rhythm, chosen

Running March through October is both a shelter and a discipline. The first weeks bring daffodils and cautious locals; midsummer hums with families and the sound of flip-flops on gravel; autumn draws couples who whisper about light like it’s a fragile thing.

Winter turns inward. He strips fleets down to frames, logs the wear patterns, and writes new route notes by the fire. “People imagine I’m off on a beach for four months,” he laughs. “Mostly I’m elbows-deep in degreaser, planning next season.”

What visitors actually want

Most riders don’t ask for speed; they ask for ease, a light day that remembers to be kind to knees and curious about detours. He keeps a chalkboard of suggestions, sketching circles rather than lines, so loops begin and end without feeling like a slog back to the start.

• Quiet lanes with room for conversation, a bakery stop, and one unmissable viewpoint before the coast drifts back to town

Money, meaning, and muddy tyres

The business didn’t bloom on day one. “The first summer, I learned more about cashflow than I ever wanted,” he says, half wry, half proud. Rain wrote sudden cancellations across his calendar, and one rogue gull pecked a saddle into modern art.

He priced carefully, advocated for repairs over replacements, and chose e-bikes with batteries he could service rather than simply swap. Partnerships mattered: a surf shop across the road, a B&B with a generous porch, a taxi driver who knows which boot fits two step-throughs and a folded trailer.

“Teaching taught me patience,” he adds. “You don’t force a result; you create the conditions where one can happen.” That mantra guides his customer service—never rush a nervous rider, never oversell a gusty day, always ask how far joy can reasonably stretch.

The human engine

He misses some parts of school life—the shoulder-to-shoulder feeling of a staffroom before period one, the respectful mischief of a class that’s secretly on his side. But coaching first-timers onto bikes scratches the same itch. “It’s teaching,” he insists, “just with better scenery and quicker feedback.”

One afternoon he guided a septuagenarian who hadn’t ridden since 1969. “We started on grass, we wobbled, and then we didn’t,” he recalls. “When she circled back, she pressed her palm against the frame like it was a living thing, and said, ‘I thought this part of me was gone.’” He went home that day with chain oil on his cuffs and an unsinkable mood.

Why here, and why now

The coast gives him a daily postcard, sure, but it also gives him community. Farmers wave him through gates, teenagers ask about gears and summer jobs, and the harbour crew swap weather gossip with the steady accuracy of old poets. “Place is a partner,” he says. “It shapes the work, and it feeds the heart.”

He doesn’t plan to scale into something anonymous. More bikes, yes; a second van, maybe; but never so big that he can’t remember who loves the cliff path and who needs the long downhill home. “I want to stay close enough to the story to hear it,” he says, tightening a quick release before the morning rush gathers at the kerb.

What a good day looks like

By late afternoon the shop smells of salt and hot rubber, and the sign on the door says “Back soon, out on a drop-off.” Helmets stack like moons along a shelf; the register holds a folded thank-you note and a scone wrapped in paper.

A family returns sun-pinked and triumphant, someone asks for tomorrow’s wind, and he writes a route suggestion on the back of a receipt with the practiced grace of a man who left one vocation for another—and found, to his relief, that both were simply ways to keep humans in motion, gently and with care.