With recent additions to the entry list including such glitterati as Pete Smyth of the Royal Irish YC with his newly-acquired Ker 46 Searcher (she was formerly Tonnere de Breskens to give the late great Dutch skipper Piet Vroon his Round Ireland win in 2010), plus father-and-son team of Andrew and Sam Hall of Pwllheli SC in Wales with the much-travelled and successful Lombard 45 Pata Negra, the lineup for the SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race from Wicklow in exactly four weeks time is strengthening nicely towards the 50-plus mark, and it’s an entry list of quality.
Interestingly, Pete Smyth has moved on from the previous Searcher, which was a keenly-campaigned Sunfast 3600, just as an international lineup of top-level Sunfast 3600 sister-ships is focusing on being in the thick of the Wicklow start, led by RORC Commodore Deb Fish with Bellino, keen to repeat her silver-laden performance in the 2023 Fastnet Race.
Deb Fish with her awards from the Commodore RORC after the Fastnet Race 2023. Now Commodore herself, she is racing the 2024 SSE Renewables Round Ireland in the Sunfast 3600 Bellino.
Former RORC Commodore James Neville is in the “Entry Pending” section with his Fast 40 Ino Noir, but taking such a thoroughbred Solent racing machine along Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard may well be something that is giving pause for thought.
BLASKET WATERS CAN BE ROUGH, ROUGH, ROUGH….
In the 2022 circuit, his previous boat, the HH42 INO XXX, sustained damage in that notoriously tough area seaward of the Blaskets of the Kerry coast, and had to retire. But that sometimes exceptionally rough bit of water is something that comes with the territory.
Is that design new or what? James Neville’s futuristic Ino Noir
Thus while Royal Cork Yacht Club Admiral Annamarie Fegan’s successful Grand Soleil 40 Niuelargo - which she co-campaigns with husband Denis Murphy – is going again on June 22nd, they’re in no doubt about what they might be taking on. For as Denis admits, back in 2022 the area west and particularly northwest of the Blaskets provided Nieulargo with the roughest sailing she has ever come through in thousands of miles of offshore racing.
The Murphy-Fegan family’s successful Grand Soleil 40 Nieulargo from Crosshaven found the roughest water yet experienced in thousand of miles of offshore racing out to the northwest of the Blaskets in the 2022 SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race, but nevertheless she returns for 2024’s race, Photo: Robert Bateman
That said, there are very few sections of the 700-mile clockwise circuit that don’t come up with their own particular brand of rugged racing at some stage. But equally, with a course this length around an island noted for the variety of its weather, you might be lucky enough to get mile after mile of smooth yet reasonably swift sailing when sheer racing talent takes centre stage.
PILLAR OF IRISH SAILING PROGRAMME
And with the race now so firmly established as a biennial pillar of the Irish sailing programme, the fleet is of sufficient numbers and variety to readily provide you with intense sporting competition in whatever league you may be, with 2024’s lineup including at least four previous winners, including defending title holder, Laurent Charmy’s J/111 Fastwave from France.
The J/122 Darkwood with owner-skipper Mike O’Donnell on the helm crosses close ahead of Andrew & Sam Hall’s Lombard 45 Pata Negra from Pwllheli – both are entered for next month’s SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race. Photo: Darkwoood Pix
Keeping this unique show on the road requires total dedication and many special abilities, such that over years the individual lead organisers have tended to stay in post for several stagings of the race, and this is the case with the current incumbent, former Wicklow Sailing Club Commodore Kyran O’Grady. He has taken on the responsibility for a sailing heritage which - ever since Denis Doyle gave it his blessing with regular participation from 1982 onwards with the Frers 51 Moonduster – has been integral to Irish sailing’s worldview.
Aboard Moonduster during the 1984 Round Ireland race, with the Fasthet Rock already astern and a long-standing record in prospect, Neil Hegarty on the helm, Brendan Fogarty in foreground
THE THATCHER TO THE STARS
Kyran O’Grady is the Wicklow-based sailor who cast aside family expectations of a brilliant accountancy career to become a world-standard thatcher, with top-level clients all over Ireland and abroad. Those who commission his work are of such calibre that if you’re driving the last few miles down the road to Roundstone in Connemara, the interesting-looking building by the road with the elegant O’Grady thatched roof is the recording studio of a musician and composer whose most famous work is more than somewhat adjacent to the globally-acclaimed Riverdance.
Thatcher to the Stars and Round Ireland Race organiser Kyran O’Grady of Wicklow (left) with Barry Kilcline of race sponsors SSE Renewables
Kyran’s longtime home and work-base is beside the reed-rich Broad Lough close north of Wicklow town, where his family is much involved with every aspect of the local sailing scene, and much else in the town besides. But today (Saturday, May 25th) he is back at his boyhood home of Howth, concentrating his attention on campaigning his classic dark blue 1971-vintage Swan 37 Bandersnatch of Howth in the Lambay Race module of this weekend’s ongoing Howth Wave Regatta.
TED TURNER INPUT
Bandersnatch is a story in herself. She is from the first production run in the Swan 37, the boats closely based on an early Ted Turner S&S 37 One Tonner Tenacious. The 37ft Tenacious was burning off the One Tonners in America until her charismatic owner turned his attention to offshore racing the legendary 12 Metre American Eagle. That said, he still raced the One Tonner to success, and when he first brought the 12 Metre to the European scene in 1969 (winning the Transatlantic Race to Cork for the Royal Cork’s Quarter Millennium while he was at it), he also took a few days out to campaign with his 5.5 Metre in the Worlds in Scandinavian, meanwhile all the time building the news cable service which became the behemoth that is CNN.
When the world was young….Dennis Conner and Ted Turner in their 12 Metre-racing days
There’s multi-taskers and then there’s Ted Turner, as his stellar international offshore racing career came after he’d successfully defended the America’s Cup with the inshore racing Courageous. Yet so multi-faceted and ultimately success-laden has his career been afloat and ashore that you’ll read profiles of him in the business pages that barely – if at all – mention his great sailing achievements.
So in contemplating Kyran O’Grady’s Bandersnatch racing round Lambay today, you’re looking at a boat which gives us sailors a direct and very private link to the successful sailing of Ted Turner away back in the late 1960s which the Otherworld doesn’t really understand at all, and we probably prefer it that way.
The standard Swan 37 was developed from a Ted Turner-campaigned One Tonner which made the grade in America in the late 1960s. Some owners made the mast even higher to improve light weather performance even if it made the downwind sailing under spinnaker even more challenging
Certainly the look of Bandersnatch is very much of that time, with the original’s extremely marked tumblehome (the bulge in the topsides) retained into the production boats, thereby creating a boat with rather less side-deck space than her powerful performance merited, but it streamlined her overall shape as she tore through head seas in a style which left much larger craft bobbing groggily in her wake.
The trade-off was that she was only so-so on a reach, while helming downwind in a breeze under her enormous masthead spinnaker required nerves of steel. But as co-owner Ross Courtney was of the generation that reckoned strong windward ability was the only real test of a boat, his son and co-owner Peter was able to transfer some of his own highly successful Fireball racing skills to make the best of the new boat’s wayward offwind capability.
FIRST ROUND IRELAND ALL-FEMALE CREW
Thus Bandersnatch was very much a force to be reckoned with, inshore and offshore, back in the days – mainly the 1970s and ’80s - when ISORA became so popular that its annual season-long points championship attracted over a hundred boats which had qualified through doing seven ISORA races – and real offshore races at that.
The much-sailed dark blue Swan 37 also made an input into the Round Ireland story in 1988 when the Round Ireland’s first all-female crew made a successful circuit with the boat, skippered by Romaine Cagney - she was sailing royalty as she was one of the Maguires, younger sister to the legendary Neville Maguire and aunt of now-Australian sailing superstar Gordon Maguire
GARDEN SHED RADIO STATION
Romaine’s team were sponsored by Robbie Robinson whose pirate station Sunshine Radio reputedly broadcast from a garden shed in Portmarnock, but Sunshine was ahead of the curve in backing women’s top-level sailing.
It is May 1971, and a very young Hilary Fannin (whose father Bob raced the Fastnet of that year in the boat) is giving as good as she gets from owner Ross Courtney at Bandersnatch’s boat-warming party in Howth. Photo: W M Nixon
It was in anticipation of this kind of performance that Bandersnatch’s welcome-home party in Howth Harbour in May 1971 was a heroically festive celebration of new skills usefully engaging with the more traditional outlook of Ross’s longtime shipmates such as sailing cartoonist Bob Fannin. It was such a blitz of a party that it’s said anyone who claims to have been there probably wasn’t there at all.
So today’s sailing of Bandersnatch across the Seas of Memory and round the Island of Dreams should be a welcome relaxation for her owner-skipper, as it removes him briefly from both the sometimes brutal work of thatching, and the mind-bending challenge of organising the Round Ireland. For it’s 44 years since Michael Jones sent off the inaugural biennial circuit, a race circuit which has since become part of the RORC international programme such that every other year expectations are high and rising.
Being at the coal-face in running this complex event is far from being a sinecure, rather it’s more like being the Warden of the Holy Grail. But things are looking good for 2024, and there’s even a whiff of 2016 when George David’s Rambler 88 and a trio of MoD 70s brought a mega-shower of stardust to Wicklow.
A touch of stardust – George David’s mighty Rambler 88 made the 2016 race something very special
Top of the good news list is that the entries in recent weeks have expanded spectacularly to include some genuine offshore racing glitterati. But perhaps more importantly, there are at least four former winners going, including George Radley’s ever-young Holland 39 Imp from Cobh, which also won the Fastnet in 1977 and 1979.
Those of us who have campaigned our own boats in this hyper-demanding 700-mile circuit know only too well the sheer grinding effort required to shift your already reasonably well-equipped cruiser-racer up into the stratospheric heights of sailing through the scrutiny requirements of an RORC race of this grade, but that’s only the start of it if you feel drawn to do it again – and again and again, as some have.
Forever Imp. The great Ron Holland designed classic is seen here under the late Roy Dickson’s ownership in the 1987 Fastnet Race, when she won the Philip Whitehead Cup. Also a former Round Ireland Race winner, Imp is returning this year for the circuit under the ownership of George Radley of Cove Sailing Club.
Getting the boat race ready is only part of it. Getting the right crew balance for a race that manages to be longer and more ocean-exposed than other comparable classics such as the Fastnet Race itself and the Middle Sea Race is something else on top of that. It would need a heavily-resourced HR department if you were trying to do it within a normal personnel selection environment, but over the years these are the boats that have won And these are the entries to date for this year’s race on Saturday June 22nd.
