Our headline photo breaks nearly all the blogspot’s pictorial rules, preferences and protocols. Are there any sails set in it? Not a one. Is there any presence of sea, lake or river? Yes, but it’s vanishingly small. Is there any sun and blue sky? Check. Are there any obviously nautical people present? Nope. Is the horizon straight? Deliberately not.
Yet for anyone with even the dimmest eye for a boat, this is an image which is a joy to behold in its own right. And if you’ve even a smidgin of Irish sailing history filed away in your over-crowded memory-bank, the photo is greatly enhanced by knowing that this was originally the incredible (no other word will do) Leo Flanagan’s boat, and she was and is Fingal, National 18 #226, formerly 223.
She’s an Uffa Ace design originally built using marine ply edge-glued clinker construction by Anderson, Rigden & Perkins of Whitstable in Kent in 1957-58. As Whitstable is about as far southeast as you can travel across Wales and England from the Irish Sea and Skerries without falling into the sea again, obviously there was something special going on back in 1957, where the two new glued-plank-edge boats were called “The Stickies” in Skerries long before that title had a political connotation.
Uffa Ace National 18s racing at Dinghy Week in Baltimore in the early 1960s with Stardust (63, Alan Wolfe, Royal Munster YC) chasing Somers Payne (Royal Munster YC) in Melody (206), with Fingal (223, Leo Flanagan in bobble hat, Skerries SC) ahead for once, and chasing one of the boats from South Wales, Dafydd Hughes’ Scherezade (258). Photo probably by Tom Barker of The Cork Examiner
The Uffa Ace was promoted by Yachting World magazine to support the Yacht Racing Association’s project for a national restricted (i.e.development) 18ft dinghy class, starting from an amalgam of all that was best in existing local club classes of similar size.
THAMES ESTUARY BIRTHPLACE
Many of these were in the Thames Estuary, and thus the Whitstable boat builders Anderson, Rigden & Perkins on the estuary’s Kent coast were in pole position. They were among the first builders of the Uffa Ace, which proved an enduring success until the Cork Harbour fleet – the biggest by far – introduced a glassfibre version of fairly orthodox shape to be built by O’Sullivan’s of Tralee. Then around 2014 they began a mighty leap – still in plastic but now with the Ultima designed by Phil Morrison – into an ultra-modern three man dinghy within National 18 rules.
Plans of National 18 – Uffa Fox could be relied on to provide his own flourish. Courtesy Nat 18 Class RCYC
Naturally there were those who felt even more nostalgic for the classic Uffa Ace, which had style and continued to out-perform many later wooden design. Way back in 1938, three were ordered – the first in Ireland - for Howth Sailing Club members, and it’s believed they were built by yacht designer John B Kearney‘s boat-builder brother Jem Kearney, then of Ringsend and later East Wall.
National 18s at Howth in 1939, with Tinkerbelle (15, sailed by Aideen Stokes) ahead of Wendy (14, John Masser). Photo: HYC
FANTASY NAMES
J.M.Barrie’s fantasy story Peter Pan was still all the rage at the time, so of the three new Howth boats, John Masser’s #14 was Wendy (later Dom Long’s Colleen II in Cork), while the Stokes family’s #15 was Tinkerbelle. But the third boat #16 was owned by Fergus O’Leary, and there was no way the lead Irish engineer on the mighty Ardnacrusha hydro-electric project was going to have a boat named out of fantasy land, so she became #17, Setanta.
That nucleus of a Howth class didn’t outlast World War II, but Tinkerbelle still sails with the classics in Chichester Harbour, the oldest racing National 18. Meanwhile back in Ireland the class was developing at Skerries with locally-built boats, but the greater economy of the One Design 17ft Mermaids was of increasing appeal.
The restored Tinkerbelle, seen here in Chichester Harbour, is the oldest National 18 still sailing
Then in 1958 the Flanagan brothers brought the extra-special new Anderson, Rigden & Perkins built Uffa Aces, Fingal for Leo and Finola II for Jack, home to Skerries. These boats were constructed with edge-glued marine ply planking for greater strength yet absolute minimum weight. It meant that unless other Skerries owners were prepared to go down the relatively expensive ARP road, they had no choice but to join the Mermaids if they wanted to be competitive in local racing.
“Where the unexpected happens every day” – the highly individual township and harbour of Skerries. Photo: Fingal Co Council
In Irish terms, the two new boats were very special. But then, just about everything to do with the Flanagans of Skerries seemed special. William Herbert Flanagan (1867-1937) was the entrepreneur who brought electricity to the town in 1914, which was a clear forty years before the much-vaunted National Rural Electrification Scheme got the rest of the country wired up, and incidentally brought that other nautical mover and shaker Perry Greer back to our shores.
OLYMPIC INVOLVEMENT
In Skerries after WH’s death in 1937, his son Leo stepped into his entrepreneurial shoes in the town and its surrounding area, expanding the Flanagan “conglomerate” to be involved in a bewildering variety of enterprises which achieved equally bewildering varieties (or not) of success as Leo made his merry way through a life which, among other things, saw him become the Chef d’Equipe of the Singapore Sailing Team at the 1960 Rome/Naples Olympic, and then manager of the Irish Sailing Team at the 1964 Olympics in Japan.
His brother Jack meanwhile forged a career of considerable respectability in Irish medicine, while maintaining his Flanagan sense of fun, though under more control. You get a notion of Jack from a conversation I had with him about Oliver St John Gogarty, the Dublin wit and man of letters.
Gogarty’s day job as a fashionable throat surgeon had made him enough money to have a buttercup yellow Rolls Royce, and a small aeroplane with which, early one morning, he looped the loop over Portmarnock’s Velvet Strand with such vigour that his passenger W B Yeats threw up.
“QUITE THE WRITER”
Nevertheless he didn’t impress everyone.
“They tell me Gogarty was quite the writer” said Jack with the faintest twinkle. “Well, all I can say is that in his professional life, he decided my sister’s tonsils needed removal. It took him two attempts, and even then we’re not sure she still hasn’t got them.”
The young Flanagan brothers were something of a force in the growing Skerries sailing scene, and though the 17ft J B Kearney designed Mermaid of 1932 was becoming a growing presence from 1936 onwards, the advent of the planing National 18 in 1938 attracted the interest of these Young Turks.
Precious provenance – the builders’ plate from the National 18 Fingal
At the time the very traditional International 12s – a clinker-built lug-rigged dinghy designed in 1912 – set the pace in the growth of Irish dinghy numbers nationally, as the Dublin Bay Water Wags of 1887/1900 stayed resolutely in their own patch, as did the Shannon One Designs of 1922.
But in the Solent, Uffa Fox with development boats like the International 14 proved his theory that if you moved the hull rocker – the deepest part of the underwater hull – forward from amidships, the buoyant “chest” which developed in the underwater lines helped the boat, when sailing fast offwind, to rise up on the vigorous leeward bow-wave and then “plane” at velocities exceeding the theoretical hull speed as measured for displacement boats.
This was such an exciting development that people went mad for it, and it lingers on most markedly in another Uffa Fox design, the Firefly which – as many of us who did an excessive amount of college sailing can attest – will sometimes, in a real squall, rise up on her huge noisy lee bow-wave with such exuberance that she pirouettes spectacularly into capsizing to windward.
NOISY WHITE WATER
The existence of so much noisy white water around the forefoot in those early planing designs was so obviously detrimental to even further speed that design development – aided by sail power improvements – tested just how far aft you could move the rocker while still being able to plane, and ultimately the Flying Dutchman emerged – powerfully rigged, sleek of hull, and able to plane to windward in the most skilled hands.
Jack Flanagan’s Finola II of 1957-58 is another formerly Irish-owned National 18 that has joined the Classics at Bosham on Chichester Harbour
But though a modern glassfibre National 18 will have the rocker further aft than the relatively deep-chested Uffa Ace, the Uffa Ace has so many fondly nostalgic associations from childhood memories of seaside holidays in National 18 sailing places that they exert a mighty appeal, and are the crème de la crème for National 18 Classic restorations, their story faithfully recorded in Brian Wolfe of Cork’s superb book National 18-foot Dinghy, published in 2015.
LATEST CLASSIC 18 RESTORATION
The latest to do this National 18 is Roger Bannon, now Dun Laoghaire-based and a former President (1994-1996) of the Irish Sailing Association, but with a skilled sideline as an amateur boatbuilder and restorer to professional standards. Our lead photo is the outcome of the three years “leisure” job he has done in bringing Leo Flanagan’s 1957 Fingal back into the full of her health.
“Serial boat restorer” – multi-boat enthusiast Roger Bannon
Childhood experiences are everything. The Bannon family’s big house was in Balbriggan, but for summer they decamped to their other house down the road in Skerries, where Roger was taking his first steps afloat before 1960, and it was a special time as Skerries seemed to be filled with sailing giants. Harry Grimes was the undisputed king of the Mermaids in Nichapanda, while Jack Flanagan and his brother Leo, the town jester, were setting the pace locally and nationally in the Nationals 18s with Finola II and Fingal.
HARRY GRIMES, MASTER OF THEM ALL
In his quiet way, Skerries schoolteacher Harry Grimes was the master of them all. He was a genius at making boats go well in lumpy seas and little wind. I’d the good fortune of sailing with him in 1971 aboard Ronnie Wayte’s new Hustler 35 Setanta of Skerries, and by season’s end we’d won our Division in the Irish Sea Offshore championship including the RORC Irish Sea Race, and had taken second overall in Class IV in the Fastnet Race.
Harry Grimes (left) with Dickie Gomes on the helm as the Hustler 35 Setanta of Skerries runs fast and true in the Fastnet Race of 1971, in which she placed second in Class IV. Photo: W M Nixon
As we parted ways in Plymouth after that Fastnet Race, another crewman – Johnny McWilliam at the beginning of his sail-making career – nodded towards Harry’s unobtrusively receding figure, and quietly said: “He’s the best of us all”. Johnny was right. And the very young Roger Bannon in Skerries had benefited a few years earlier from the skill and instructional empathy of The Master, as he tells us here:
THE ESSENCE OF HARRY GRIMES
“Harry was one of the best sailors with whom I was fortunate enough to spend time. A quick story tells a lot about the man: We had an elderly Mermaid No 61 Jan Mar, in which we cut our teeth when learning how to race in Skerries. One Saturday while racing in decent sized fleet for a prestigious trophy, we found ourselves leading the fleet to a finish just off the harbour.
Needless to say, the boat closest to us was Nichapando No 114, with Harry charging up to catch us. We only had about 200 yards to go to the line, and Harry started to coach us on how to ensure we did not let him get by us. Taking his advice, we managed to scrape across ahead to experience our first ever race win. To this day the “Phoenix” Tankard (sponsored by Smithwicks) is the only sailing trophy that is displayed in my home.
This classy behaviour was typical of Harry Grimes, who I regard as the Uncrowned King of Irish Sailing. No matter what boat, he could quietly make it go faster than anything around him. He also had great hands, and was the most skilful boatbuilder I ever encountered other than the late great professional Peter Dunne of Rush”
MOVE TO NATIONAL YACHT CLUB
Over time, with his home base becoming the National Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire, Roger Bannon went on to sail to success in a remarkable variety of boats, often several of one type, including a 420, Fireballs (4), Flying Fifteens (5), Olympic Finn, Olympic Star (1), J/24 and SB20 (5), while always having a Mermaid in the background – he has owned seven.
The National Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire is where Fingal took to the water after a three year restoration
EXCEPTIONAL RECORD OF SUCCESS
His competitive record speaks for itself, as he has logged 10 national titles in four different classes – the 420, Mermaid, Flying Fifteen and J/24 – and in taking the J/24 across the channel, he took runner-up in the British Championship in 1989.
With a Mermaid always either in the background or centre stage, he frequently raced to a podium position in championships, but it bothered him that some owners were having difficulty in maintaining the often quite elderly boats. So in the hope of providing the class with a new line of healthy expansion, in the late 1990s he commissioned the building of a glassfibre-hulled Mermaid, but with wooden deck in the hope of placating dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists.
The wool line of thought was maintained in calling the new GRP Mermaid Dolly, after the sheep which had been recently cloned in Edinburgh. But no good deed goes unpunished. Although Dolly made a very favourable impression with her public debut at the Irish Boat Show, a tense meeting of the Mermaid Association in Clontarf Yacht & Boat Club saw the debate swing back and forth, and eventually the adoption of the GRP Mermaid was rejected by just two votes.
A bright idea under a cloud? The glassfibre Mermaid Dolly (white) impressed everyone except the Mermaid Association
Dolly is now based in Sag Harbour in Long Island, but that’s the Long Island in America, where she is much admired and is well away from the deep negative emotions of the Mermaid Association in Ireland.
Ironically, however, her three fibreglass sisters can sail betimes to Long Island, but it’s the Long Island among Carbery’s Hundred Isles, and that’s because after their rejection by their timber sisters, they were snapped up by a sailing school in West Cork.
Despite all this, Roger Bannon’s love of the Mermaid remains strong, but the variety of the life-forming sailing scene in the Skerries of his childhood and youth is such that he is polygamous in his boat affections, as those remarkable National 18s also made an impact. He continues the story:
JACK FLANAGAN’S INSPIRATION
“As a young fellah of 12 years of age, I learned to sail in Skerries under the tutelage of Dr Jack Flanagan in Finola II. I was always fascinated by these beautiful “Sticky” Nat 18’s, which were so dominant and quick. Jack was a wonderful teacher and not only inculcated me with the basic skills of sailing but, together with the great Harry Grimes, encouraged my interest in racing at which he was extemely good, unlike Leo who was primarily preoccupied with the on-shore activities associated with sailing, including wine, women and song.
“Leo, after incurring some damage, eventually sold the boat, Fingal No 223 later 226, to Joe Grimes who intended to repair her. It seems little work was done on her and she languished in a disused forge in Skerries for over 25 years. Then in the late 90’s, Brendan Redden (originally from Skerries but living in England) tracked down the boat and acquired it.
“He subsequently spent over 2,500 hours completely restoring the battered fabric of the boat, and quite serendipitously launched it back at Skerries for it first sail in nearly 30 years on the occasion of Leo’s funeral. (See the story in Brian Wolf’s excellent history of the National 18’s.)
“Some years later, I had arranged for the 18’s to have their Championships hosted in the National Yacht Club, and contacted Brendan with a view to enticing him into joining other Classic 18’s at the event. He told me he had no interest in racing, and would only use Fingal for gentle cruising with his family. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards, Brendan died prematurely from cancer, and once again the boat fell idle, but was stored in a magnificent custom-built shed in Rush.
FIREBALL LINK
“A few years ago” continues Roger Bannon, “Brendan’s brother Martin, an old friend from Fireball days, approached me and asked would whether I would be interested acquiring Fingal and in recommissioning and maybe modernising the boat.
The National 18s are powerful big dinghies, and this latest up-grading of Fingal saw ergonomically efficient modifications. Note that although the original builders were able to eliminate ribs with the edge-glued marine plywood clinker planking, they still retained the use of copper rivets, Photo: Roger Bannon
“I jumped at the opportunity. This boat seems to consume huge amounts of hours and a bit like Brendan’s efforts (which were the real heavy lifting) almost another 1,000 hours later, Fingal has been completely revamped, damaged woodwork replaced and her equipment completely updated”.
Born again. The inverted Fingal shows the 1938 version of an 18ft planing hull. The forward rocker is not as marked as it needed to be in a smaller boat like the Firefly. Photo: Roger Bannon
NEW RIG
“This included a new modern rig with carbon boom, trapeze and fly away spi poles, new sails, modern carbon rudder, and revised modern Harken equipment layout, together with a galvanised combi road trailer and launching trolley. However, we retained the original 85Kg cast iron centreboard, which was restored to its original elegantly smooth condition.
The infinite shine of the restored foredeck
CROSSHAVEN SUPPORT
“The somewhat complex Tufnol winch used to raise and lower the centreboard was completely rebuilt, using only original Tufnol materials augmented with careful use of epoxy. This rebuild would not have been possible without the support of several members of the Crosshaven fleet who donated loads of kit and offered great advice.
Brightening another 2024 grey day – the restored Fingal arrives for launching at the National YC in Dun Laoghaire
Fingal under sail for the first time in very many years
“I have thoroughly enjoyed the project and hope the National 18 Fleet are happy with what I did. My intention was to retain as much of the essential classic attributes of the boat whilst upgrading everything to make her fun, easier and safer to sail.
“The next project for this winter will be to complete the restoration of the Mermaid Helen No 76, on which Sam Shiels has done a lot of work over the last few years. This iconic Mermaid was barely rescued in time from the scrapheap, and now needs a job done on it, not unlike the one I have just completed on Fingal.
Maybe my back might improve sufficiently to allow me enjoy some sailing in these beautiful old boats?
Fingal gleaming through the grey as she powers along
WHAT’S NEXT FOR CLASSIC 18 FINGAL?
“The plan is to do three or four classic boat regattas around the country, and maybe one classic Nat 18 event in the UK. There is also some chat about getting a few classic boats together for an event in Ireland.
“To be honest (concludes Roger Bannon) after selling my venerable Mermaid Endeavour 10,2 my family put me under pressure to ensure we would continue to have a Mermaid in the family.
“They had all grown up with there being always one despite all the “plastic fantastic” race boats which were a feature of my racing background for over 40 years. I have won 11 National titles in 4 different classes, and sailed competitively at international level, but my enduring love was always with the traditional Mermaid.
“I have built one, rebuilt three and of course built five GRP Composite boats, which the class rejected by two votes at a very heated EGM in Clontarf. I am not sure if I am physically capable of racing a Mermaid again, which is why I sold Endeavour last year. But for my sins, I have acquired Helen No 76, and my plan for this Winter is to complete the great job Sam Shiels has done in retrieving her from being a virtual wreck.”
The completion of the Fingal restoration has set a very high standard.
