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Apart from Tim Goodbody's participation in the OK Dinghy European Championships, the OK class has no real history in Ireland. However, alongside the resurgence of the class internationally in the last decade, there's now also activity in setting the class up on these shores.

The OK dinghy is perhaps the most internationally active non-Olympic single handed dinghy. It's a classic design, but fully updated now with carbon mast to match the excellent handling. It's sailed in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, the Nordics, Australia, New Zealand, and there's renewed activity in historically active countries like the Netherlands, the USA and Canada....with the Asian fleets - as always - small but persistent.

The class in Ireland is still small, but there's interest in both North and South, and a new class association website here

We're told there'll be a few boats on the water in 2012 to show off the advantages of this class, and there are several people interested in finding boats during next year.

Published in Racing

William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago