With a chest-clogging cold snap of soul-sapping frozen fogs likely to be replaced here this weekend by roof-lifting wet and windy gales, the very thought of sun-dappled Sydney Harbour and its sublime sailing will be a spirit-raiser for yotties throughout the northern hemisphere. And nowhere more so than in Ireland, where we never have to go very far through the entry list to find some close, semi-close or distant sailing member of the diaspora, who will be giving the 628 nautical miles dash to Hobart his or her very best.
They’ll be cheered on by our numerous race-tracking brigade at home as we achieve an enchanted if temporary screen-led escape from the ferocious demands of the traditional family festive mindset, and we’ve been feeding that escapism already with the recent Solas Big Boat Challenge on Sydney Harbour on YouTube
THE PEAK OF THE PADDY PYRAMID
As it has been for more than thirty years in the Hobart Race, at the top of the “Paddy Pyramid” is expat sailing superstar Gordon Maguire. He’s originally from Howth, but for quite a few years now his official World Sailing Number, with its indication of nationality status, has been AUSGM1. This would seem to suggest that he has no immediate plans to return to share the hilly Howth peninsula with its recently-added flock of Old Irish Goats, recruited from far Mayo complete with comely goatherd. But either way, for now we can be sure he is focusing on augmenting his unrivalled record of Hobart race overall wins.
When it all started – Atara in perfect trim on Sydney Harbour, December 1991
This began in 1991 when he and Harry Cudmore combined to provide the dream team and overall victory for John Storey with his very attractive Farr 43 Atara. That provides us with yet another excuse – were it needed – for again displaying the cover of the relevant edition of the old paper-printed Afloat magazine, which not only says everything about what sailing can be like in Sydney Harbour at this time of the year, but also reinforces our crusty viewpoint that racing boats were rather better looking in them days.
Since then, Maguire has logged the big win so many times with owners of the calibre of Stephen Ainsworth of the Loki range, and Matt Allen of the Ichi Ban fleet, that now instead of straining the synapses to recall the exact number, it’s more effective simply to say: “A lot”.
MAGUIRE TO LINK WITH THE LANGMAN LEGEND
A noted multi-tasker both afloat and ashore and a huge force in Australian sailing, Matt Allen is giving the Hobart contest a rest this year as an owner. The result is that the Maguire challenge is the greenest green is has ever been since 1991, as he has teamed up for his 22nd Hobart Race with Sean Langman to race the Reichel Pugh 69 Moneypenny.
To describe Sean Langman as “the legendary Australian sailor of exceptional versatility” is only starting to get to grips with an impressive nautical polymath. He’s a pillar of the famous Sydney Harbour 18ft skiff class, yet in recent years he has raced to Hobart in a gaff-rigged restored traditional fishing boat with the same enthusiasm as he has thundered down the same course in a succession of biggies. And in 2018, he acquired a newish but under-optimised Reichel Pugh 65 from the US, and as an experiment re-named her Naval Group and campaigned her with a crew of rookies made up of cadets from the Australian navy. Now that is sail training with an edge, and then some.
In 2019 the boat was lengthened to become an RP69 (Australians are doing this sort of thing all the time with boats large and small), and 2022 has been Langman’s year of total big boat full-on campaigning, with the name Moneypenny restored, and the sleek black hull an increasingly familiar sight on the leaderboard and at the front of many fleets.
Langman already had a crew of formidable talents, with the pace being set by ace international soothsayer navigator Matt Humphreys. But six weeks ago, it was all moved up a step or three by bringing Gordon Maguire onto the strength, and it has been a busy and industrious time afloat and ashore for everyone ever since, as all Langman projects tend to be Work in Progress.
Gordon Maguire taking the reality of being one of the tall poppies comfortably in his stride
The results have been showing even more in the right direction, such that Moneypenny is now rated as one of the favourites for the Sydney-Hobart Race 2022 when it starts in nine days’ times. It’s the kind of attention that most crews – even the most exceptional such as we have here – will have mixed feelings about, for there’s an element in Australian society of schradenfreuders who are as gruesomely pleased as their fellow-thinkers elsewhere of seeing the tall poppies fall. But it goes with the territory, and Gordon Maguire is such a gracious winner that his fans worldwide will be rooting for Moneypenny with added fervour.
The swift one…..Bow Caddy Media record Moneypenny (above) showing ahead
OFFALY’S CAHALANE TEAMS WITH FASTNET WINNER SUNRISE
One of the most popular visitors to the Irish sailing community since the pandemic restrictions were lifted was Tom Kneen, who sails out of Plymouth to such good effect that his JPK 11.80 Sunrise won the August 2021 Fastnet Race overall, and as far as all right-thinking people are concerned, he was also a clear winner of the Middle Sea Race in October as well.
Tom Kneen (the surname is of Manx origins, so you might say he’s half-Irish) proved a star turn at the ICRA Conference in the National YC in March this year, providing a pep talk and answers session of such unassuming modesty that it made everyone think they could go out and win the Fastnet Race.
Fastnet Race overall winner Tom Kneen at the ICRA Conference in the National YC in March. Photo: Brian Turvey
With the Middle Sea victory then added on, the question has been where the Kneen Team will strike next. The answer came this week when Sunrise arrived in to the Sydney-Hobart-organising Cruising Yacht Club of Australia’s marina in Rushcutters Bay on Sydney Harbour, and set about preparing for the big one.
There’s a precedent for this JPK campaigning at a distance. Some years ago, just after Gery Trentesaux had recorded the first of his two wins in the Fastnet Race with a JPK 10.80, it was recalled that a JPK 10.80 was cruising the Pacific. The owners were persuaded to divert to Sydney where Gery and his crew turned up with a complete set of new sails and raced the boat to Hobart so well that the won their class and were right in the frame overall, leaving the cruising owner and his crew to go on their way rejoicing, with thousands of Euros’ worth of new sails added to their inventory.
The Sunrise Secret of Success….at the optimal angle of heel, the JPK 11.80 has greatly reduced her wetted area, yet if the wind freshens further there is plenty of spare hull power available to make the best use of it.
Since then the Aussies have been trying – like everyone else – to get as many JPK boats of all kinds into their fleet as the production line will allow, but now the current top JPK in the world has arrived in to take them on in their home waters. And the affable Tom Kneen is some operator under his amiable exterior, for Sunrise will be navigated by Adrienne Cahalane, Australia’s top female sailor in all departments, who is definitely one of ours as she was born in Offaly and is a cousin of the renowned Nenagh ILCA ace Aisling Keller. But as this is Cahalane’s 30th Hobart Race, she is now a long way from Lough Derg.
BALLIVOR’S JIM COONEY DOWN-SIZES – TO A VOLVO 70 – WHILE SLATTERY STAYS WITH COMANCHE
When you’ve been successfully campaigning a hundred footer, any down-sizing move can still leave you with a lot of boat to sail. Jim Cooney – whose people come from Ballivor in County Meath – currently holds the Sydney-Hobart course record which he and Samantha Grant (and maybe two dozen others) achieved with the almost-mythical JK 100 Comanche.
Comanche is still on the scene, having been sold to John Winning who is very much up for the 2022 Hobart dash, and there’s still an Irish link as Justin Slattery of Wexford and Kinsale is at the heart of her crew.
No room for error…..in the confined space of Sydney’s Inner Harbour, the 100ft Comanche (with Justin Slattery in the crew) powers towards the finish at the Opera House to take line honours in this month’s Solas Big Boat Challenge
They’ve been having a great time of it this month, as Comanche made a brilliant job of taking line honours in convincing style in the Solas Challenge, making it look almost easy to see off the challenge of four other hundred footers, and it emphatically isn’t easy when you’re down at sea level with all that heavy metal and acres of sail thrashing around in a very limited space.
But in the midst of it, Jim Cooney and Samantha Grant were making an even cooler job of it racing their alternative “handy little boat” – the Volvo 70 Willow ex-Ericsson 3 ex-Groupama. And after all the numbers were crunched at the end of the Solas race, Willow was the CT winner, adding to her prospects as yet another favourite for the race to Hobart.
LEE CONDELL OF LIMERICK TAKES ON THE HOBART TWO-HANDED DIVISION WITH SUNFAST 3300
You can take the boy out of Limerick and Ireland, but you can’t take Ireland and Limerick out of the boy. For many years now, Lee Condell of Limerick has been building a successful career in the performance boat end of the Australian marine industry. But he keeps well in touch with the old country, and it was he who alerted us to the continuing presence of the Mamie Doyle-designed, J E Doyle of Dun Laoghaire-built (in 1905) 54-footer Granuaille in Tasmania.
More recently he’s been in touch about a restored vintage boat built to the Dublin Bay 25 design which was originally constructed in Australia around 1900, using ready-made frames shipped out from Fife’s own boatyard in Fairlie in Scotland.
But we’ll have more about that another time. For, this week, Lee has been busy finalising Hobart Race preparations on a new Sun Fast 3300 (she’ll be a sister-ship of Cian McCarthy of Kinsale’s successful Cinnamon Girl) that Lee and Lincoln Dews will be racing in the Two-Handed Division, which will have an element of One-Design competition about it, as the attractive Sun Fast 3300 is well-represented.
Lee Condell of Limerick and shipmate Lincoln Dews aboard the Sun Fast 3300 they’ll be racing two-handed to Hobart
SALUTE TO THE MEMORY OF ALAN CONDELL
This is all to the good for Lee Condell, as he is – among other things - a Jeanneau agent in Australia, so the boat will have the no-nonsense name of Sun Fast Racing. But there’s much more to it than that, as “young” Lee is facing being sixty, so showing that you can still hack it in the Hobart race two-handed in a 33-footer with six decades on the clock is a matter of putting down a significant marker.
And it goes deeper than that again, for one of those who slipped away in the depths of the Pandemic was Lee’s own father Alan, and Alan Condell and the development of sailing in the greater Limerick area were synonymous. Yet although his funeral was in Limerick’s St Mary’s Cathedral – linked forever with Conor O’Brien whose global circumnavigation with the Saoirse centenary comes up next year – the farewell to Alan Condell had to be a very muted affair. So for Lee Condell, racing a Sun Fast 3300 two-handed over the 628 miles to Hobart is very much a salute to the memory of Alan Condell, a gesture which will be widely shared.
Lee Condell’s Sun Fast Sailing in training on Sydney Harbour. He has multiple reasons for racing the two-handed division to Hobart, not least being in memory of his late father Alan Condell of Limerick, whose mid-pandemic funeral in St Mary’s Cathedral had to be a restricted ceremony
IRISH INPUT ON AMERICAN CHALLENGE
Although the famous American classic S&S yawl Kialoa II (originally built for California’s Jim Kilroy, who claimed close links with Cork) is going again, she’s very much under Australian ownership these days, and the timing of the Sydney-Hobart Race generally seems to have been a bit of a dampener for serious American interest in recent years.
But now there’s some turbo-power going into US participation with the February 2022 RORC Caribbean 600 winner, the TP52 Warrior Won ex-Bad Pak, well into the mix. Warrior’s successful northern summer went on to include being mono-hull line honours class winner in the Cruising Club of America’s Centenary Year Bermuda Race in which - more importantly - she won the Gibbs Hill Trophy for tops on Corrected Time.
Howth’s Shane Diviney is on the strength of American challenger Warrior Won, seen here on her way to winning the RORC Caribbean 600 in February 2022. Photo: Robert Hajduk
Warrior Won is being brought to the Sydney line in serious style by Chris Sheehan with his internationally-flavoured Connecticut-based team, which includes ace Canadian tactician Richard Clarke (four Olympics and a Volvo overall win, how about that then?) and the special talents of Howth’s much-travelled man on the action end of many successful boats, Shane Diviney. He has scored successes at the top level in multis and a range of mono-hulls from the very newest to the demanding restored classics of the International 15 Metre Class, which are definitely not a sailing environment for the faint-hearted.
KIWIS CALL ON DUN LAOGHAIRE TALENT
While Americans may seem like exotic aliens from another planet, the sailing rivalry between Australia and New Zealand is up close and personal, and any Kiwi boat on the Sydney starting line can expect no favours at all, though of course we wouldn’t dream of suggesting that the crew are marked men in any way.
Nevertheless, it takes something special to get invited into this particular maelstrom, yet Cian Guilfoyle of Dun Laoghaire has done that very thing, as he is doing his first Sydney-Hobart Race aboard Max Klink’s Auckland-based but internationally-raced 2021-commissioned Botin 52 Caro. She’s a notably attractive TP52 boat which has already proven herself up to the challenge of upsetting Australian expectations at Hamilton Island back in August, so the stakes are extra-high racing to Hobart.
An upsetter of Aussie applecarts? The handsome Botin 52 Caro – racing for New Zealand – includes Dun Laoghaire’s Cian Guilfoyle in her multi-talented crew
Time was – and it wasn’t so long ago - when a fleet of 112-plus would have been thought very good going for the Sydney-Hobart Race. But even with the occasional meteorological extremities during the past year or so, the good times are rolling Down Under, and the Sydney-Hobart Race 2022 is capturing the mood of the moment. Doubtless we’ll hear of other Irish sailors involved at some level during the next week, but for now the atmosphere around Sydney Harbour is pure magic mixed with tense anticipation – it has all the makings of a classic.
