Let us imagine that you are both an enthusiast for Conor O’Brien (1880-1952), the Shannon Estuary’s great pioneering voyager, and that you are also one of those number-crunchers who enjoy calculating on what particular day significant anniversaries will fall in the future. Let us also imagine that it is twenty-five years ago, and you happen to be a regular reader of the Sailing on Saturday column, which in those pre-internet days always appeared – summer and winter - in our largest-circulation daily newspaper, The Irish Independent.
Let us further imagine (we’re really stretching this) that all those years ago, you’re idly considering what days fall when - in 2023 - the Centenary of the beginning of Conor O’Brien’s great voyage with the Baltimore-built 42ft ketch Saoirse round the world south of the Great Capes occurs. And lo, when you note that the 1st April 2023 falls on a Saturday, won’t you inevitably think that it would make for a grand idea, 25 years in the future, to use April Fool’s Day 2023 to make a spoof reveal in Sailing on Saturday that not only has Saoirse herself been painstakingly re-created in secret, but somehow – also in secret – the 56ft Conor O’Brien Falkland Islands ketch Ilen has been immaculately restored, and both will be sailing Ireland’s seas and further afield in 2023 in proper celebration of O’Brien’s achievement.
Fantasy becomes reality – the restored Ilen during a cruise to Greenland in 2019. Photo: Gary Mac Mahon
Back then, it would have seemed a very useful notion to put in the Totally Crazy Ideas Store-Room, for implementation in due course when 2023 came around. But now, it is 2023. However, our world is going through such a phase of sometimes tragic absurdity that the very idea of April Fool stories seems almost offensive. Yet if we take out that daft idea of 25 years ago, and hold it up to the light, we find that not only are the Ilen restoration and the Saoirse re-creation sailing the seas and looking very well indeed, but the Centenary is being celebrated in a seemly manner with restrained yet very appropriate ceremonies, while further honoured with the timely re-publication of O’Brien’s relevant books.
The “new” Saoirse has her first sail, February 2023. Photo: Kevin O’Farrell
GARY MAC MAHON’S UNRIVALLED INPUT
Let us be in no doubt that the very existence of Saoirse and Ilen in their present healthy form is due in the first instance to the dogged – sometimes maddeningly so – determination and almost blind faith of Gary Mac Mahon of Limerick. Twenty-five years ago, he had recently inspired the return to Ireland from the Falkland Islands of the decommissioned but still very much alive 56ft 1926-built trading ketch Ilen. Subsequently, he went out to Jamaica, where the 1922-built 42ft Saoirse had come ashore in 1979 on a beach in the aftermath of hurricane, and bought up every last bit of the ship that could still be found.
And then – for she had never been declared a total wreck – he bought these bits and pieces from the then owner, and became the registered owner of what we now probably have to think of as the “first Saoirse”.
But even while this was all going on, Gary was still very much involved in the restoration of Ilen at Liam Hegarty’s boatyard at Oldcourt above Baltimore in concert with the Ilen Project Boatbuilding School in Limerick, and deeply immersed – sometimes to the point of semi-drowning - with the endless fund-raising involved in providing the resources required to make her into a certified educational sailing vessel.
Gary Mac Mahon at the helm of Ilen in Greenland, July 2019
Yet with all this taking place, he still had to find the time to think about placing advance orders for the timber which would be required to build the “old-new” Saoirse once the Ilen restoration project had been completed. While he enjoyed the backroom research aspects of it all, and the practical experience of seeing the ships taking shape, as a very private person who definitely marches to the beat of a different drum, he found the necessary public appearances utterly exhausting and emotionally draining, such that the support of his wife Michelle and colleagues in their shared design venture, the Copper Reed Studio in Limerick, was invaluable.
CONOR O’BRIEN CENTENARY AQUIRES OWN MOMENTUM
But now, with the entire Conor O’Brien Centenary project acquiring an unstoppable momentum of its own, after 27 years, Gary Mac Mahon is in the process of stepping back from frontline involvement. We use the term “in the process” advisedly, for with such a complex individual implementing this extraordinary range of ideas, straightforward boundaries are difficult to delineate.
Nevertheless, Ilen is now into the complete management of the Sailing Into Wellness movement, while the building, commissioning and sailing of Saoirse has long since been the private venture of Fred Kinmonth, a Hong Kong-based corporate lawyer with an already distinguished sailing career, and a longterm family connection to West Cork.
Baltimore Wooden Boat Festival, with Kevin O’Farrell’s Mylne-designed classic Canna on left
In fact, West Cork is now the focus of attention, and just this week the noted West Cork-based photographer Kevin O’Farrell (himself the owner of the very special Alfred Mylne Scottish Islands Classic OD Canna) has released an unprecedented photo of Saoirse and Ilen in line ahead together on the slipway at Liam Hegarty’s yard, with their first conspicuous date afloat being the Baltimore Wooden Boat Festival in the final weekend of May 2023.
ARTWORK AND BOOKS
Kevin O’Farrell has already published an extremely evocative book of atmospheric photos of Ilen being restored, and soon a similar book about the Saoirse will appear. Meanwhile, painters and illustrators have inevitably been drawn to the unique atmosphere which prevails in the old Top Shed at Oldcourt when the work is under way, and our headline image has been provided by Baltimore-based artist Paula Marten, who will be having an exhibition of her work during the Baltimore Wooden Boats.
Vincent Murphy’s re-print of Conor O’Brien’s From Three Yachts utilises “Primitive School” paintings of the three vessels with which O’Brien was most closely associated
BALTIMORE WOODEN BOAT FESTIVAL 2023
The official dates for the Festival are 26th to 28th May, but Paula’s exhibition will be in Bushe’s Bar from 24th May onwards. Meanwhile there are – or were - books a-plenty which related to O’Brien, but Kinsale’s Vincent Murphy, another of those who have been drawn into the Saoirse Spell, has arranged for the re-publishing of O’Brien’s interesting post-circumnavigation work From Three Yachts, while the Irish Cruising Club – through the energies of Alex Blackwell of Clew Bay – has brought out a sixth edition, with a new context-setting introduction, of the book of the voyage, Across Three Oceans.
Charlotte O’Brien Delamer launches the 6th Edition of Across Three Oceans with ICC Commodore David Beattie. Photo: Daria Blackwell
This was formally launched last weekend at the ICC Annual Dinner in Sligo by Conor O’Brien’s great-niece Charlotte O’Brien Delamer, and it includes the original foreword by Claud Worth. His status as a cruising and voyaging guru of world significance during the 1920s was such that Bill Nutting of New York sought his support in 1922 before bringing the Cruising Club of America into existence, with last year’s Centenary of the remarkably successful and influential CCA a testimony to the soundness of its founder’s thinking in seeking Worth’s support.
As there are no images of Saoirse at sea under her world-circumnavigating rig, the new 6th Edition of Across Three Oceans captures the essence of this unique vessel in the simplest possible way.
Thus although we have published Claud Worth’s thoughts on Saoirse’s voyage before in Afloat.ie, it is so elegantly put that it deserves repetition here:
“…anyone who knows anything of the sea, following the course of the vessel day by day on the chart, will realise the good seamanship, vigilance and endurance required to drive this little bluff-bowed vessel, with her foul uncoppered bottom, at speeds of 150 to 170 miles a day, as well as the weight of wind and sea which must sometimes have been encountered…..
….. however common long ocean voyages in small yachts may become, Mr O’Brien will always be remembered for his voyage across the South Pacific and round the Horn.”
For those who prefer something more tangible, during June 2023, there will be a gathering of the Irish Cruising Club, the Royal Cruising Cub, the Ocean Cruising Club and Portuguese craft in Madeira to mark the exact Centenary there of Saoirse’s arrival after her maiden passage out from Dublin Bay, and naturally, there will be an initial get-together in Dun Laoghaire with Ilen then leading the way south.
And, of course, with June 20th 2025, so clearly being the Centenary of O’Brien’s return to Dunleary, as he preferred to call it, that will be the mother and father of all Centenary celebrations. But for those who think that’s still a very long time ahead, there’s one key date that surely deserves to be marked in some special way.
Some time towards or after midnight on the 2nd December 1924, Saoirse crossed the longitude of Cape Horn, having run down her easting from New Zealand in the Roaring Forties, and then veered south into the “Furious Fifties”. This little ketch built by Tom Moynihan and his team in Baltimore had secured her very special place in voyaging history. In the Irish time zone, it would already have been 3rd December 1924. Now there’s a neat Centenary celebration, set in a time of the year when celebrations come into their own.
Twenty-five years ago, this would have been dismissed as mad fantasy –Saoirse and Ilen in line ahead this past week on the slipway at Oldcourt. Photo: Kevin O’Farrell
