We know that the biennial SSE Renewables 700-mile Round Ireland Race from Wicklow is a significant fixture in the international calendar. We know it well, because since its inception through the dedication of the late Michael Jones and his voluntary cohort of fellow Wicklow SC members in 1980, we’ve often had to grit our teeth and keep smiling when some visiting overseas superstar owner-skipper heads away yet again with one of the major trophies and in some cases – as with George David’s marvellous Rambler 88 from the USA in 2016 - there was a total sweeping of the board in every category for which the JJ-designed big magic boat was eligible.
The previous Teasing Machine and Rambler 88 shortly after the start of the record-breaking, record-making 2016 Round Ireland race. Photo: W M Nixon
And we’ve only ourselves to blame, even if we in turn can say it’s all Wicklow Sailing Club’s fault. They in turn can say it’s Ireland’s coastal geography that should be blamed. Because in international offshore racing iconography, the Fastnet Rock is in a league of its own, with maybe only Cape Horn fit for comparison.
The Sun Fast 3600 Bellino at the Fastnet Rock. In 2024 she will be passing the iconic lighthouse in the opposite direction in the Round Ireland Race with new RORC Commodore Deb Fish on board. Photo Carlo Borlenghi
But while Cape Horn is many expensive miles away from the numerous offshore racing fleets of the northern hemisphere and particularly Europe, the Fastnet Rock is a very conveniently located yet properly mysterious symbol. Yet what’s for sure in the Fastnet Race is you’ve to cross a very real but compact area of genuine ocean to get to it from the Cowes start, an area of sea which in 1979 in particular - and in other years too - has shown that it can display a singularly vicious boat-breaking streak, all of which has ultimately added to Fsstnet-rounding’s special appeal.
FASTNET ROCK MIGHT BE PART OF HY BRASIL
For in rounding the Rock - which begins to seem like a slightly-house-trained outpost of the mythical-but-real-of-course land of Hy Brasil that is always just beyond Ireland’s western horizon – offshore racers feel that they are sharing a semi-spiritual experience which plugs them directly into the very live wire of offshore racing’s history, combined with its present and its future.
And if the visibility is good and they are reasonably sentient and curious people – if they’re alive, in other words – then the fascinating glimpses of the nearby Irish coast are sufficiently varied to be intriguing enough to find participation in the Round Ireland Race being added to many a Bucket List, not least because it involves yet another salute of the Fastnet Rock
ADDICTIVE ROUND IRELAND RACE
But far from being a one-off Bucket List item, the Round Ireland Race can become addictive, because so far every staging – and there have been 21 - has been completely different, with sometimes the only common feature being the required seaward passing of the Fastnet Rock.
The Round Ireland’s place as a race in the international classics pantheon is now secure, for as the great navigator Stan Honey commented in his New York Yacht Club-organised Zoom discussion with Sydney-Hobart super-star Matt Allen earlier this week to preview the up-coming Hobart challenge on December 26th, the main body of the world’s offshore racing fleet cannot do any race over 600 miles as no more than a sailing sprint.
The 700-mile Round Ireland race. Definitely more than a sprint, yet it requires constant vigilance in addition to regular off-watch sleep
FOR MOST BOATS IT’S MUCH MORE THAN A SPRINT
You have to get some sort of sleep-providing sea-going routine in place, a fact which explains why so many of the offshore classics often see radical place changes in the last 150 or so miles.
We’ll return to that Stan Honey-Matt Allen brain-storming session in our Sydney-Hobart Preview here on December 23rd. But meanwhile, at its course length of 700 miles (give or take a mile or so), the Round Ireland comfortably qualifies as a classic that provides genuine – and indeed sometimes ferocious – ocean sailing while at the same time offering a regular supply of not-too-distance opt-out havens.
Round Ireland Race Organiser Kyran O’Grady of Wicklow SC (left) with Barry Kilcline of sponsors SSE Renewables
Thus although the entry list for the 2024 Round Ireland doesn’t open until January 29th, as reported this week on Afloat.ie the current Race Organiser, former Wicklow SC Commodore Kyran O’Grady, happily learned at the Royal Ocean Racing Club Annual Prize-Giving Dinner in London last weekend that there’s already an impressive lineup of international “boats of significance” intending to head for Ireland in June and the 1400hrs on Saturday June 22nd start at Wicklow.
RORC SUPERSTAR PARTICIPANTS TO BE LED BY TEASING MACHINE
Top of the pile-on is the irrepressible Eric de Turckheim with his NMYD 54 Teasing Machine. De Turckheim collected the RORC Yacht of the Year Trophy at the weekend and indicated his intention of participating in the Round Ireland next June, but meanwhile top of his agenda is the Sydney-Hobart Race in just over a fortnight’s time.
Ordinary mortals may well wonder how a boat can fully commit to such total participation on the other side of the world and then expect – possibly after participation in the RORC 600 in the Caribbean in February – to be on the line in Wicklow in just six months’ time. But we’re in an elevated ownership league here, where all things are possible.
RORC’S FIRST WOMAN COMMODORE
That’s as may be, but it’s intriguing that the current main point of RORC interest is that it has just elected its first woman commodore with Deb Fish – she’ll be taking up the post in January 1st, and will also be coming to Wicklow next June with the Sun Fast 3600 Bellino aboard which she sails with Rob Craigie with such success that they won the RORC overall points championship for 2023.
Incoming RORC Commodore Deb Fish collecting a raft of awards after the 2019 Fastnet Race with then Commodore Steve Anderson. Photo: RORC
And, of course, in Cork Harbour, next month will see the installation of Annamarie Fegan of Nieulargo as the first female Admiral of the Royal Cork, arguably global sailing's premier role. The point of special interest is wonderment that it took so long for the RORC to have a woman Commodore. After all, the first woman commodore in Ireland is believed to have been Avril Harris in the Dun Laoghaire Motor Yacht Club some time well back in the previous Millennium, and when Commodore Deb Fish arrives in Wicklow, she’ll be welcomed by WSC Commodore Karen Kissane, who is by no means the first WSC female chief. The too, women skippers have been taking major seagoing prizes since Elizabeth Crimmins of East Ferry on Cork Harbour was awarded the Irish Cruising Club’s premier trophy, the Faulkner Cup, in 1934.
Yet it’s also the case that from its early years, the RORC has had an active female input afloat and ashore, with the women of the Hunt family playing a key role in Spica’s winning of the RORC Championship in 1931, while the late ’30s saw Rachel Pitt-Rivers set some of the RORC pace with the Nicholson cutter Foxhound.
A BLEWITT FROM BALLINA?
Then from the 1940s onwards, Mary Blewitt (later Mary Pera) was completely at the heart of things in top-level offshore racing. With a name like Blewitt, we can probably find an Irish link, and she may even have been distantly related to Joe Biden. But for international offshore racing and ocean sailing, neither her gender nor her family descent were the points of interest.
Mary Blewitt navigated John Illingworth’s intriguing Myth of Malham to overall victory in the 1949 Fastnet Race
On the contrary, her USP was her skills as navigator to super-skippers such as John Illingworth – she guided him to at least one Fastnet Race overall win – and her very complete knowledge of classic navigation was such that she was able to write the slim but hugely instructive handbook “Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen”, (now in its 13th Edition) which is seen by many extra-experienced ocean voyagers – the usually acerbic Don Street among them – as the defining introductory work on an a now possibly vanishing if sometimes life-saving skill.
INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE SERVICE
She was also into the Rules of Racing, and wrote a book about that too while serving on various international committees. But for many very effective years, she was best known as the Executive Secretary of the RORC.
It was Mary Pera who, in August 1974 early in the morning of the proposed start of the RORC’s Cowes-Cork Race, made an assessment of the state of the Needles Channel as a real Force 9-plus sou’westerly started to make against the first of the spring ebb to create a maelstrom, and she sensibly postponed the start to the evening ebb when the wind was accurately forecast to have eased.
The late Sean Flood at the helm of Otto Glaser’s McGruer 47 Tritsch-Tratsch II as she gets into smoother conditions in the early stages of the postponed RORC Cowes-Cork Race 1974. While the foul weather is clearly moving away astern, the Needles Channel had still been so full of breakers that at one stage the B&G impellor was pushed into the boat by the force of a head sea. Photo: W M Nixon
That said, it was still rough enough for our boat to bang into a head sea out of nowhere with enough force to punch the B&G speed impellor back into its housing - normally a two-handed job, that was a spooky experience which reinforced our agreement with the morning’s postponement decision
IMPORTANCE OF FIRST OFFSHORE RACE START POSTPONEMENT
The fact that Mary Pera had made the decision meant it was accepted without demur and welcomed by senior race officers generally. For in the rapidly expanding and developing state of offshore racing in those days, there were new crews who, though they perhaps weren’t aware of it, didn’t really fully accept the traditional offshore wisdom that whether to start or not in marginal conditions was entirely the skipper’s responsibility.
And even if they did accept it, many in the growing numbers of families ashore often didn’t. The days of firing a starting gun on time absolutely regardless of weather were gone, and when Mary Pera quite rightly signalled the new parameters, not a soul thought to ask: “Well, what would you expect from a woman?”.
IRISH INTERACTION WITH RORC
Kyran O’Grady found such enthusiasm for the Round Ireland Race at the RORC beanfeast that the potential starters also include former Commodore James Neville with his Carkeek 46 Ino Noir. He’ll come with no doubts about the reality of the Round Ireland challenge, as his HH44 had to pull out of the 2022 race with structural problems off the rough Kerry coast.
Slippery customer. Former RORC Commodore James Neville’s new Carkeek-created Ino Noir brings her owner-skipper back to the Round Ireland challenge next year. It’s unfinished business, as his previous boat in the 2022 race had to retire with damage off the Kerry coast.
Thus the race reflects both its universal attraction, the active interaction there has always been between Ireland and the RORC, and the significant role that women sailors have played in both.
LAURA DILLON’S ACHIEVEMENTS AFLOAT AND ASHORE
So athough it was our male offshore racers who tended to figure most at the top of the RORC officer listings in the form of Denis Doyle Of Cork, and John Bourke and Michael Boyd of Dublin Bay - with the latter two reaching the position of Commodore - Laura Dillon of Howth stood down in 2022 from three years of being RORC Rear Commodore while also being prominent afloat as the helm of Dutch owner Harry Heijst’s S&S 41 Winsome, which may now be of classic vintage but is well able to mix it successfully with the newest boats.
This easy international interaction and sense of continuity goes right back to the first Fastnet Race of 1925 (yes, I know the Centenary is just two years away, but right now that’s another day or two’s work) when Harry Donegan of Cork with the hefty yet fast cutter Gull was one of seven skippers in that first Fastnet, and came third overall. In doing so, he became even more of a one man Irish Sailing Promotion Institution both at home and abroad, such that boat interests were never completely absent, even at traditional family gatherings.
The importance of the regular involvement of Denis Doyle of Cork with Moonduster in the Round Ireland Race from 1982 onwards cannot be overestimated in terms of encouraging the event’s growth. He is seen here in Wicklow after Moonduster’s win and creation of a real breakthrough course record in 1984, with his navigator John Bourke top left. Photo: WSC
DENIS THE MENACE
Typically, his nephew Denis Doyle recalled childhood family gatherings for Sunday lunch with his Uncle Harry Donegan’s family, when the adults sought some post-prandial peace by setting Denis and the many other youngsters to the task of sanding Gull’s numerous wooden blocks in preparation for varnishing.
“Did they never allow you to do the actual varnishing?” I asked.
“Just once” said Denis. “But it had to be stopped because one of us insisted on tasting the varnish off the brush, and encouraged the others to do the same”
“And who was that?”
“Me”.
IRISH BOATS IN 2024 ROUND IRELAND
Laura Dillon having re-focussed with an Irish return, she has lately been sailing with her Howth clubmates the Evans brothers aboard the J/99 Snapshot, ICRA Boat of the Year 2022, which was the very close overall runner-up in the 2022 race round Ireland.
Former RORC Rear Commodore Laura Dillon keeping an eye on race developments from the weather rail aboard Snapshot on the way to another win. Photo: Afloat.ie/David O’Brien
Most Irish boats that might have a Round Ireland campaign in mind may not yet have revealed their hand. So with the time luxury of that January 29th opening of the entry list, the coming holiday season will see increasingly serious discussion around many boats about final programme plans, including whether or not the SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race is in there as the peak of the season.
FINDING THE DREAM TEAM
And from that there’ll be the discreet putting out of feelers to carve the dream team from the crew panel, while the escapist following of the Sydney-Hobart Race will provide encouragement and the ideal antidote to any excess of Yuletide celebration.
