Time was in sailing when the Golden Jubilee of any One Design Class was a matter of extra-special celebration. But it’s now more than fifty years since glassfibre construction became mainstream. Thus instead of fleets dominated by timber boats which became time-limited in their lifespan unless they were guaranteed increasingly lavish annual maintenance, much of our sailing is now done in plastic fantastics, the best-built of which can last for ever with little enough attention, even if they do respond very well to a little bit of spit and polish and other forms of TLC.
Thus the intensely-focused SailSat Editorial Complex initially had only brief cause for pause this past week when reminded that 2023 will mark the Golden Jubilee of the Ruffian 23 Class. The facility’s Verbiage Creation Unit soon hummed steadily back into full productivity with the thought that Ruffian 23s are attractive, robust, and able seagoing boats with a sparkling performance, while being well-built with it. And we should know, as we were there when it all started in Portaferry in County Down at the entrance to Strangford Lough in 1972, and we sail-tested the prototype in a brisk nor’easter in March 1973.
A brisk March day in Strangford Narrows in 1973 as Dickie Brown gives the new Ruffian 23 her first test. Photo: W M Nixon
Thus there was another pause in the production process here at the thought that we were there all those fifty years ago. For although many of the Ruffian 23s will sail merrily through the Centenary before there’s any thought of landfill or whatever way they deal with a hundred-plus years old plastic boats in 2073 and beyond, the weakness of human flesh is such that many of the key players back in 1973 are either already landfill, or scattered to the four winds. And notwithstanding various Faustian pacts, it’s unlikely any of the rest of us will still be around in visible form, despite an unhealthy interest in cryogenics, and a firm intention to do a spot of haunting in due course.
RUFFIAN 23s ACTIVE AT MANY CENTRES
So although Afloat.ie will be carrying more specific information about the Ruffian 23 Golden Jubilee Celebrations plans as we get further into 2023 with that initial jubilee of the test sail in March, at this stage it’s sufficient to say that at 50 years the Ruffian 23 is healthily active as a class in Dun Laoghaire with DBSC, in Dublin Port with Poolbeg Y&BC, with Mayo SC in Clew Bay, with Carrickfergus SC on Belfast Lough, and with the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. There are also strong nuclei in other centres, notably Greystones, Kinsale, West Cork, and Galway Bay, while the Ruffian 23 flame is kept alight by individual overseas enthusiasts in several countries.
With crewmen working in some of the city’s large sail-making factories, inevitably the Hong Kong Ruffian 23 fleet does not adhere to the Home Fleet’s Dacron sails rule
The high point of the special programme will be a Golden Jubilee Weekend at Portaferry on June 16th and 17th to which most boats will sail in a cruise-in-company. Class Captain Feena Lynch of Dun Laoghaire (who crews with former DBSC Commodore Ann Kirwan on the successful Bandit) and Vice Captain Roger Smith of Poolbeg are working on a class home-coming programme which will make best use of a characterful port renowned for its hospitality and unique for its special place in Ruffian 23 history.
Where it all began – Portaferry wll be the setting for the Ruffian 23 Golden Jubilee festivities in mid-June. Photo: Wikipedia
The date allows for plenty of breathing space before the Ruffian 23s feature in the Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta from July 6th to 9th, while the class also organizes an inter-area event which, at Carrickfergus in 2022, saw Mayo SC dominant overall while the time-honoured contest between Carrickfergus and Dun Laoghaire saw Carrick win after a count-back.
HOW IT ALL STARTED
Clearly, the Golden Jubilee Year is being built on a class in good heart, but before we’re immersed in it all, it’s timely to remember how it started, Back in the 1960s, Dick Brown and his older brother Billy had various enterprises in Portaferry, where the Brown family had been part of the fabric of this somewhat idiosyncratic place ever since a distant patriarch of the tribe arrived in the town as either a Customs Officer or a Coastguard, liked what he saw, and decided to stay on after declining an offered promotion to another posting.
To thrive, the family had to have fingers in many local commercial pies, but they did well academically too, with an older brother, Tommy, going on into a distinguished career as a lawyer in Belfast, while Billy went into academia and college lectureships. But he was always drawn back to Portaferry, a feeling shared even more strongly by the youngest brother Dickie who determined to make his life there and raise a family in Portaferry, bringing new prosperity to the little town while he was at it.
Dublin Bay has been a stronghold of Ruffian 23 racing since 1976. Photo: Afloat.ie/David O’Brien
This involved so many projects that at times you’d the feeling that the weekly general meeting of the management of the Brown Brothers Conglomerate was really held on Friday evenings in Dumigan’s tiny pub just off the Portaferry waterfront, where everything from the renting of land through the sale of livestock or the transfer of houses and the operation of a television and electronics company, could be allied with the buying and selling and the talk of boats and boat matters, for the Brown brothers were very much into sailing.
THE GENESIS OF THE “BIG RUFFIAN”
So after doing the 1969 Fastnet Race with Ronnie Wayte and his Carrickmacross, County Monaghan-designed-and-built 35ft Mayro of Skerries which finished 122nd in a fleet of 250, the Brown brothers decided they could do better, and Billy set to on the design work for a 35-footer, while Dickie cleared a commodious pig-farming shed at the foot of his hillside garden above the sea, and there he built the hull of the new boat upside down in wood in several skins to become the original 35ft Ruffian.
She was a success from the start, with many wins in 1971 and winning her class championship in the inaugural ISORA programme of 1972. But in the circumstances of the time, 35ft was too large a boat to contemplate series production, whereas some members of the Royal Ulster YC up in Bangor were contemplating a new OD Class based on the rapidly-expanding International Quarter Ton Class. And thus the Ruffian 23 was born, designed by Billy in the early hours of the morning as usual, when he felt he worked best as the air wasn’t cluttered by other people’s thoughts, and then series built by the Brown brothers in some converted premises near Portaferry by a company they called Weatherly Yachts.
The first Ruffian 23s set sails made by Johnny McWilliam’s Tasker Sails at Crosshaven, and flew the burgee of the Royal Ulster YC. Photo: W M Nixon
The irony is that though it was the spark of positive interest from RUYC which was one of the spurs to going into production with the new boat, as this was before Bangor Marina opened in 1984 the number of people prepared to keep their boats in the open anchorage of Ballyholme Bay was decreasing – particularly after a devastating northeasterly storm in August 1976 - and thus the focus of the new class’s One-Design Racing never really developed at Bangor.
HITTING THE SPOT AT DUN LAOGHAIRE BOAT SHOW 1976
But the class started to take off in Dublin Bay after Weatherly Yachts had exhibited at the Dun Laoghaire Boat Show in 1976, with the Ruffian 23 class taking hold and - in the best longterm Dublin Bay One Design style - thriving ever since. Other places were interested too. Far to the north, the nascent sailing club in Reykjavik in Iceland got to hear of the Ruffian 23, and ordered half a dozen. The gallant owners arrived in Portaferry to sail their boats home at the appointed date, which was a very effective inducement to getting this export order completed on time.
Presidential Seal of Approval…..President Hillery with Billy Brown aboard the Ruffian 23 at the 1976 Dun Laoghaire Boat Show
Meanwhile, halfway round the world, ex-Pats in Hong Kong got to hear of the boat, and in the Royal Hong Yacht Club the Ruffian 23 continues to have cult status, with immaculately-maintained boats sailing with maximum-plus crew numbers, and some setting black sails. This wouldn’t be allowed at most other places as the standard Ruffian 23 OD still sets Dacron, but as several of the crews in Hong Kong work in the local sail-making plants, it would be thought very odd if they didn’t go for the very best in racing sail-cloth.
Alas, little has been heard in recent years of the Iceland flotilla. But in Ireland, the class is having a new lease of life, particularly along the Atlantic seaboard. For as anyone who has ever taken a Ruffian 23 to windward in a big seaway with a firm and steady breeze will enthusiastically attest, the little boat just loves it, and it might have been built with Atlantic sailing primarily in mind.
Hong Kong by night. The close relationship between the hull shape of the Ruffian 23 and that of the original Ruffian 35 is clearly evident in this night image of one of the RHKYC fleet. Photo: RHKYC Ruffian Assoc.
In fact, when the first Round Ireland Race of all was sailed as a two-hander in three stages from Ballyholme YC in 1975, the smallest entry was Jim Poole’s Ruffian 23 Ruffino from the National YC, crewed by Eamonn Crosbie, and they finished second overall to the much larger S&S 34 Korsar raced by Robert Mollard and Dick Watson of the Royal St George YC.
Other Ruffians have cruised round Ireland, most notably Rila skippered by former NYC Commodore Ronan Beirne. He also cruised this little ship out to St Kilda beyond the Outer Hebrides, a notable Scottish venture similarly completed by the ultimate senior serious Ruffian 23 cruising and racing crew, the Royal Irish YC’s Mickey d’Alton, Franz Winkelmann and Leslie Latham. They got to those rugged islands despite a combined age of more than 220 years, and also despite the fact that, with Franz’s great height, the reality of the Ruffian 23’s very compact headroom mean that, as Mickey put it: “We had to fold him up before he could get below”.
MAGIC MOTORWAY BLUE
As most Ruffians were used as inshore racing One-Designs with offshore and cruising potential, some of the galleys were highly individual, and none more so than on an early boat, Jim Blaikie’s Diff’rent Drummer. Jim was the most amiable man you could meet and sail with, so he easily persuaded Weatherly Yachts that Diff’rent Drummer’s gelcoat should be that unique blue you find in Motorway road-signs. For as it happens, a friend ran the company in Belfast making those signs in vast quantities, so Jim was able to get the special paint by the barrel for next to nothing.
Afterwards, with the new hull looking very well, it took for ever to get the last traces of that expletive-deleted blue out of the mould in order to build the next white Ruffian 23. But by that time Jim and his shipmate Bob Hutchinson were working on optimising the tiny galley, into which they managed to fit a complete two-burner gas stove with oven. And in order to get the best use of it, Bob made a huge square cast-iron frying pan, which exactly fitted the space above one of the burners.
The standard Ruffian 23 layout provided only a basic galley, but Jim Blaikie and Bob Hutchinson made their cooking arrangements luxurious
Aboard Diff’rent Drummer, they may not have been able to stand up down below. But they could sit in comfort preparing luxurious one-pot meals long before telly chefs invented such things, and having cruised with them, I can assure you that they lived like kings.
NEVILLE MAGUIRE’S SPECIAL SPALPEEN
Another special Ruffian 23 owner who managed to talk himself into a unique boat was Neville Maguire of Howth. He and Dickie Brown were kindred spirits who got on extremely well despite the fact that Dickie prided himself on the strength and integrity of his boats, yet Neville wanted a hyper-light boat on which he would set an ultra-high fractional rig using the needle-spar system which he and another Howth engineer-innovator, Brian Murphy, were developing in their own various ways.
Reach for the stars…..Nevillle and Gordon Maguire hanging in there with the hyper-light Spalpeen in Class 3 at Howth, on an evening when they could have used some extra crew. Photo: W M Nixon
The result for Neville Maguire was the appropriately-named Spalpeen. She had some outstanding successes, particularly if Neville was able to secure his son Gordon as crew when the latter was not totally involved in developing his soaring national and international Windsurfing and Laser-racing careers. But in truth, Spalpeen was just too demanding for an average crew, particularly anyone who was accustomed to the standard Ruffian 23’s feeling of solidity and comfort.
POWERFUL IN A BREEZE
For that is what we best remember from that first sail of fifty years ago. It was real March weather, a blustery and dense northeasterly which, in the Narrows at Portaferry, could change almost instantly from heavy gusts of 30 knots-plus to near calm. But out in the open water of Strangford Lough, with the seas enlivened by the weather-going tide and the sunlit breeze strong and steady for a good slug to windward, the Ruffian 23 came into her own. She’s a “little big boat” in her style. With the main reefed and the No 2 genoa providing mighty power, she balanced a treat and went like a train. The de-briefing that evening in Dumigan’s was a celebration.
A great life in sailing – the late Dickie Brown helming in the 2012 Golden Jubilee Ailsa Craig Race. He was second in the first race of 1962, and won overall in 1963. Photo: W M Nixon
