A week of maritime-related festivity is underway today (Saturday) as Coastival gets going in Dun Laoghaire, with the Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta from next Thursday through to Sunday contributing mightily to a peak of dynamic interaction between town entertainment and sea sport through the unique harbour.
Tomorrow (Sunday) sees the Grand Parade on-water of Dun Laoghaire-related classic boats starting in-harbour at 11:30 and using the East Pier as the basis of their course, as they sail round to Sandycove with maritime historian and boat-restoration polymath Hal Sisk providing a commentary.
GRAND PARADE OF CLASSICS
The historic flotilla will include the first four finished boats of the Dublin Bay 21ft Class restoration programme. They are emerging in the broader picture as the symbol of the town’s old and new interaction with the sea through recreational sailing. For ever since its construction began in 1817, Dun Laoghaire’s monumental yet totally artificial harbour played a unique and often developmental role in Dublin Bay sailing development, to such an extent that what happened first in “the old granite pond” often went on to have national and international relevance in sailing elsewhere.
Recreational sailing and racing may have started to come to prominence elsewhere, but after the new harbour was completed Dun Laoghaire provided a unique combination of affluent population and good sailing water in close proximity. By 1870 the port was the world leader in the codification and development of formalized yacht racing, as recorded by Hal Sisk in this book.
It’s quite the special place, so artificial that it’s ultra-real to such an extent that at an early meeting of the town’s Save our Seafront movement, one of the platform speakers referred to it - without irony – as “this wonderful natural feature of Dublin Bay”. In fact, these days when virtual reality seems more real than actuality, the sense of a film set devised for the likes of Cecil be de Mille or James Cameron to demonstrate the extraordinary achievements of early 19th Century civil engineering in its insouciant confidence, with the development of an exuberantly neo-classical style of club pavilion architecture, makes for an exceptional, daring and entertaining combination which is best appreciated by sailing into the place.
MIRACULOUS EXISTENCE
In other words, its existence is something of a miracle, for there’s no way you’d get planning permission to create such a place effectively from nothing in 2023. So instead of trying to sanitise history or even topple old statues or monuments, most folks in Dun Laoghaire today are happily grateful that twists and turns of history – some of them good, some of them definitely bad – can be left in their boxes while people nowadays use this amenity, in a very 21st Century way, as an ideal location for staging regattas.
The process of restoring the 1902 Dublin Bay 21 Class has provided an appropriate symbol for Dun Laoghaire’s special place in world sailing history, and the first four boats to be brought back to life will be starring in tomorrow (Sunday’s) Grand Parade of Classic Sail.
DUN LAOGHAIRE IS PERMANENTLY 90% “REGATTA-READY”
At some sailing venues, if you want to stage a major regatta or some other special event afloat, some re-working of the basic waterfront infrastructure may be required. Not so in Dun Laoghaire. In fact, so stately are the historic waterfront pavilions gracing the crowded shoreline as yacht clubs serving Dublin Bay, that you could argue that Dun Laoghaire is “Regatta Ready” on a 90% basis.
All you have to do is send up more flags, press the button marked “Trained Volunteers Requested”, and you soon have the colourful setting and the required number of race organising teams with a shared experience and applicable knowledge going back two centuries.
“There never was an overall plan”. When construction of the harbour started with the first stages of building the East Pier in 1817, the simple plan was for an “asylum harbour” in which the crews of vessels seeking temporary shelter – almost all of them sail-only – would not have any contact with the then-largely-undeveloped shore. As the best strategists put it: “Never have A Plan, but always Keep Planning.”
Quite. We should be so lucky. But as it’s a Dun Laoghaire tradition that huge organisational effort can be put into a successful regatta without this effort being unduly visible to the participants – an attitude being continued by current Chairman Don O’Dowd and Event Director Paddy Boyd – the role of competitors is to enjoy themselves in a unique setting.
PALACES OF MARITIME SPORT
For someone sailing into Dun Laoghaire for the very first time, it can be almost over-powering. Surely these Palaces of Maritime Sport must be like museums, protected by cordons of velvet rope and supervised by uniformed wardens?
Not a bit of it. For any sailing family in Dun Laoghaire, the grand clubhouses are anything but pretentious. For that’s the way they’ve always been within living memory and way beyond. While young sailors elsewhere may take their first steps afloat from some glorified Portakabin on the shores of a bleak reservoir, for Dublin Bay junior sailors, living as happy, fulfilled and very active sailing kids in stately surroundings is just the way it happens to be.
It’s all done with such unconscious ease that a visiting American sailor was once moved to comment: “The Irish do their posh yacht clubs very well indeed. They’re now comfortable with their clubs’ history, however different and difficult it may have been at various stages of time past. They’ve worked out ways of living with that past, respecting the best of it, yet you’ve a sense of concentration on the present, living for the moment, and always with some focus on the future as their sailing continues to develop on what is successfully established, while leaving room for attention to future possibilities. And all of it is ultimately for the good of sailing and the community”.
The Royal Irish Yacht Club. The many young sailors learning the ropes here are unaware that they’re doing so from premises which – when opened in 1850 - were the world’s first complete purpose-designed yacht club building
Thanks to the strength of the “hidden machine”, there’s a flexibility of approach which means that – as we’ve put it here before – in order to stay the same, Dun Laoghaire regattas have always to be ready to change. For by staying the same, we refer to the effect it has on all participants, afloat and ashore.
Regardless of the format, they have to come away from the programme of racing and socialising with the feeling that this is the best possible regatta that could have been staged in Dun Laoghaire and on Dublin Bay for the times that are in it. Thus over the years, right since the very first regatta was staged in 1828, new approaches have been developed.
Now over-used as it’s the only illustration available of the event, this was the first very successful regatta at the new harbour of Kingstown in 1828. Things didn’t go so well in 1829 – a sudden extreme downpour led to spectating fashionable see-and-be-seen Dubliners returning soaked and disgusted to town, while afloat the tensions were such that the crews of competing boats were fighting each other hand-to-hand before the fleet had even cleared the harbour
ADAPTING TO CHANGING DEMANDS
One-day events might have become two-day events. Then now and again, somebody has a rush of blood to the head, and for a while, everyone has a go at an entire Regatta Week. Yet it begins to seem too long when part of weekly life is that Dublin Bay Sailing Club stages what is, in effect, a regatta every Thursday evening.
That particular quandary indicates that special features are needed when many of the competitors live within a short travel journey of the boats and clubhouses, while others may have travelled significant distances to take part. If you try to force people to create an entire Regatta Week atmosphere in these circumstances, you’re devaluing the reality that many South Dublin sailors cherish the fact that they can pop down to the club of a summer’s evening just for some undemanding casual relaxation and a chat with old friends.
It is planned that the prize-giving on Sunday at the National Yacht Club will be well over by the time the flood-lighting goes on
A full-on Regatta Week is many things, but undemanding it is not. Its very intensity can lead to satiation before the programme is complete. So since 2005, the biennial Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta has its own special 4/3 day formula. Thus next week, the 2023 staging from July 6th-9th – the first since 2019 thanks to the Pandemic - sees the major classes have a couple of races on the Thursday, July 6th, but other classes don’t get fully involved until Friday.
With a fleet of 300 and counting, there are five race areas, but for many where possible, Senior Race Officer Con Murphy is noted for his ability to set a highly visible finishing line within the harbour, representative of Dun Laoghaire sailing in the rare ould times.
The Royal St George YC will be the focus for the Super-Buzz next Saturday night (July 8th). Photo Afloat.ie
Although all four clubs are going to be a-buzz throughout, the word is that the Royal St George Yacht Club will be the focal point for buzz-plus on Saturday evening, while the National Yacht Club will be staging the all-singing all-dancing prize giving at precisely 4.0pm on Sunday, July 9th. That concluding show is going to last – we’re told - exactly one and a quarter hours, so if you trip up in collecting your trophies, expect to be walked over until some kind soul hauls you out of the way of a procession of blinkered silver-seekers.
FLEET VARIETY
It says much about the regatta that the 300-plus boats in wide-ranging classes pushing towards the 30 mark can be seen as ranging between the 1887-originating Dublin Bay Water Wags and the newest kids on the block, in the Irish National Championship of the Cape 31 Class.
Cape 31s in full cry. In Dublin Bay terms, they’re still the new kids on the block
The Water Wags, in their initial version, were up and running in 1887 within a year of Ben Middleton in his office in Dublin, taking out a bit of time to codify the rules of One Design Classes. Today, the class in its 1900 version, as designed by Maimie Doyle of Dun Laoghaire, has never been healthier, with more than 50 boats – including some very new ones – now officially registered as being class-qualified.
The sun sets on sailing as the pandemic moves in. The Dublin Bay Water Wags – which include Olympic sailors and international champions from a variety of classes – had the last race of all on the evening before the pandemic lockdown was implemented. At Volvo Dun Laoghaire Week, this ancient class’s current healthy state, with new boats being built, symbolizes the resurgence of sailing
It makes you wonder a bit about so-called progress. Ten years after the Wags started racing, up in Belfast Lough, the 25ft LWL No 1 Class – able Fife-designed boats which could comfortably cross the North Channel or sail to Dun Laoghaire for regatta participation in the Clyde or Dublin Bay – were up and running within a year of the class first being mooted.
WILL CAPE 31s MAKE THE BREAKTHROUGH?
Yet how long have we waited for the Cape 31s to fulfil their obvious potential as the ultimate performance one-design keelboat? For sure, they’re a hit in their waters of origin at Cape Town. But even with global warming, there’s no way that most Northern Hemisphere sailing centres can match Cape Town’s warm, strong breezes and the intensely localised enthusiasm of the original Cape 31 fleet.
Thus in Ireland, keen Cape 31 sailors still have to travel in search of worthwhile competition, and it remains to be seen if Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta 2023 gives the class a real foothold in Dublin Bay. Meanwhile, the J/109s – the perfect size of boats for a senior reasonable modern “DBOD” – are back having a moment, with their domination of IRC1 in the Sovereigns at Kinsale, and 14 boats lined up for the start of racing next Thursday, even if their offshore star Mojito from Pwllheli has elected to race in the Coastal Division rather than the meat-grinder which is IRC1 in the Bay.
John Minnis’s up-graded A35 Final Call II, with a glamourous eye-catching spinnaker, will be the leader of the northern contingent at the Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta
We’ll have more time to study runners and riders next week as the countdown intensifies. For now, it’s a wonder to reflect that not only is Dun Laoghaire and its sailing something of a wonder in itself, but its sense of a shared space emerging from a turbulent history without the need to tear down ancient and sometimes symbolic structures is something of an example for a changing modern world.
