Royal Cork Yacht Club has cancelled its 50-boat AIB Autumn Series 2020 due to "Irish Sailing guidelines that stipulate that all local, regional and national events should cease under level 3 Covid-19 restrictions".

The Cork Harbour cruiser-racer league that enjoyed a buoyant start on September 27th, lost its second race due to gales last Saturday. 

Unfortunately, it marks yet another event cancellation for the Crosshaven club in this, its 300th anniversary year.

RCYC Rear Admiral Keelboats Daragh Connolly has told competitors the club aims to resume racing when the 'guidelines allow'.

Monkstown Bay Sailing Club in Cork Harbour has cancelled the rest of its October Dinghy League series due to the imposition of Level 3 COVID-19 restrictions.

The series started last Saturday and attracted a buoyant fleet of mixed dinghies including Lasers, RS400s, Fevas and Optimists as Afloat reported here.

Crosshaven Boatyard's new owner Pearse Flynn (see Afloat's report 28-09-20 here) has revealed further details of how the extensive facility in Cork Harbour will fit into his plans to provide comprehensive shoreside and on-water services for offshore wind farms off the Cork Coast, some as far as 70 miles at sea.

The yard, famed as the birthplace of Sir Francis Chichester's Gypsy Moth V in 1970, Tim Severin's ocean-voyaging "super-currach" St Brendan in 1977, and Denis Doyle's legendary offshore racer, the Frers 51 Moonduster, in 1981 - in addition to many other internationally-noted craft - is expected to be retaining many of its basic leisure boating services, while providing new work in the supply chain to the offshore wind industry.

Originally from Ballycotton in East Cork, Pearse Flynn (57) has had a remarkable international career, both as a senior executive in large corporations with a global reach, and as an entrepreneur. But according to an interview with Ian Guider in yesterday's Business Post, his heart has always remained in Ballycotton. And having one of his two homes there, he is keen to develop the vitality and economic clout of the small south coast ports, while retaining their strong sense of community.

Thus he feels that a highly-skilled locally-based workforce could be created by dynamic interaction with the growing wind energy industry. He reckons that if the ports such as Ballycotton and Crosshaven cannot provide the special combination of skills and service vessels, then his personal experience of working with the big international corporations involved leaves him in no doubt that they will readily import what they need from wherever it is easily available, depriving the small Irish ports of potentially significant sources of structural income and local employment.

Busy man back home – international entrepreneur Pearse Flynn in Ballycotton. Photo courtesy: Irish Examiner 

Thus he has invested €10 million in buying the boatyard – which comes with nine acres in a mix of workshops, covered storage and boat building facilities, in addition to extensive outdoor boat storage – and in ordering two special service vessels.

As to the actual wind farms, one line of approach which the team in his company Green Rebel Marine is researching is the possibility of turbines on floating platforms. But as of now, the village of Crosshaven is getting used to the idea that some truly cutting-edge sea-going technology may well be developed in a special place where traditional and modern boat-building have successfully inter-acted for many years.

All Ireland Junior champion Chris Bateman leads Class One of Monkstown Bay Sailing Club October Dinghy League after the first two races sailed from a boat start in Cork Harbour on Saturday.

Second in Class One's 18-boat fleet is fellow Laser sailor Brendan Dwyer. Alex Barry and Sandy Remmington are third in an RS400.

Despite the Laser Munster Championships being sailed on the same weekend at nearby Kinsale, 11 Lasers opted for the popular MBSC League with a cash prize. 

A six boat Class Two is led by Laser 4.7 sailor Harry McDaid. 

Provisional results are here.

Sunday 9 am:  Racing today in Royal Cork's AIB Autumn Series in Cork Harbour has been abandoned. 'N' over 'A' was hoisted on the club flagpole this morning indicating the second day of the series has fallen to strong winds. As Afloat reported earlier (see below) the club waited until this morning before making the final call, "We wanted to give it every chance but the breeze now looks to be coming in at midday", said RCYC's Alex Barry.

Saturday: 6 pm Although the shadow of a gale warning hangs over the second day of racing in Sunday's AIB Autumn Series in Cork Harbour, the Royal Cork Yacht Club organisers say this evening they eye 'a window' of opportunity to race and won't make any call until tomorrow morning. 

The 1720s that raced separately for Munster Championships honours last weekend will join the Series tomorrow and further boost the 50-boat fleet for week two. The sportsboat class will start with Class 0 but have a separate set of results.

Forecasts show north-westerly gusts up to 45 mph at start time tomorrow morning.

The XC Weather forecast for Crosshaven

Thank you, September. You did your best to provide us with good sailing as ingenious moves were implemented to run modified pandemic-compliant events which gave proper meaning to the season, and to our sailing traditions. It was neither your fault - nor ours - that in some places a situation beyond everyone's control caused a severe foreshortening of programmes carefully tailored to deal with circumstances which then seemed to change on a daily or even hourly basis.

For sure, some fortunate sailing centres managed to have limited sailing all month, scraping weekly sport out of the last of the daylight as the evenings rapidly closed in, and working the weekends with skill. But in other locations, the guillotine slammed down at mid-month, and people found that whatever good sailing they might have experienced now had to become recalibrated in the memory bank as highlights of their very truncated sailing year.

ROYAL CORK MAKES THE BEST OF IT

No club more thoroughly deserved a final full month of good fortune in September than the Royal Cork in Crosshaven, as they emerged battered but unbowed from what should have been their globally-focused Tricentenary. Most appropriately it was that renowned backbone-of-the-club, the National 18s, which saw September out with a flourish on its very last day, racing up and down the Owenabue River off the clubhouse on Wednesday evening as the twilight settled gently until this all-important month of September had only a matter of hours to run.

Twilight for the Gods…..the National 18s at Royal Cork managed their last evening race – an in-river event off the clubhouse – on Wednesday, September 30th. The winner was Nick Walsh's Fifty Shades. Photo: Robert Bateman

With some more good luck, the club will be able to continue its Autumn League this weekend, but meanwhile like other sailing centres, Crosshaven and Cork Harbour found that September presented unusually meaningful opportunities to stage events which celebrated the places of sailing and its people, and in Cork Harbour, the come-all-ye event which best does this is Cove SC's annual Cobh to Blackrock Race.

Even though the Royal Cork had experienced its 2020 highlight in being the finish point for the successful pop-up Fastnet 450 Race in August, the Cobh-Blackrock Race is an ancient piece of the harbour's fabric, and September obligingly provided the conditions for a fast race and a real sense of occasion with life going on regardless.

The Golden Oldie comes to town. The restored 1898 Cork Harbour One Design Jap, raced by Royal Cork Admiral Colin Morehead, reaches the finish of the Cobh-Blackrock Race. The CHODs are renowned for their pleasant steering characteristics - even on this gusty day, Jap's tiller is still in a very manageable fore-and-after position. Photo: Robert Bateman

DUN LAOGHAIRE'S COMPACTED SEASON DEALT SUCCESSFULLY WITH REALITY

In Dun Laoghaire, Dun Laoghaire Motor Yacht Club's annual Kish Race is something that should in time be seen as a celebration of Dublin Bay, and in September 2020 is was shaping up that way as other events got the chop because of their inevitably high sociability quotient. Entries were flying up as racing round the Kish became more desirable than ever, but with a couple of days to go, the latest set of regulations wiped the race off the blackboard. That said, now that we know how much it can mean to the Dun Laoghaire sailing community, it's surely an all-comers cruiser-racer event which deserves more oomph in the future.

Meanwhile, as we write this there's still hope that some more racing will be squeezed out of Dun Laoghaire before the year is out. But for now, the image which best expresses the year and September in particular in its own special style is our header photo, which came our way on Thursday, September 17th from Cathy MacAleavey, and showed the finish of the previous evening's Water Wag Race, when 24 boats sailed in what might just turn out to be the last regular official race in Dun Laoghaire in 2020.

Thus what is already a richly atmospheric photo acquires extra meaning as Tim Pearson and his son Marcus in their 1995-built Little Tern cross first, narrowly ahead of Ian & Judith Malcolm in the 1915-built Barbara, while Martin and Triona Byrne in the 2019-built Hilda come in toward a third-place on port tack. There's a whole universe in that photo and it's one of the gifts which September's sailing has given us.

The Goodbody family's J/109 White Mischief was one of the most successful contenders in Dublin Bay SC's compacted but very busy season. Photo Afloat.ie

But another gift in Dun Laoghaire Harbour was the way Dublin Bay SC managed to keep things going from mid-July to mid-September, with evening and weekend racing for cruisers, keelboat and dinghies pushing comfortably over the hundred boat mark in a successfully-controlled operation which was a model of compliance.

HOWTH FINDS HEART IN LAMBAY

Round the corner in Howth meanwhile, although their time-honoured annual race round Lambay was to disappear in the cancellation of the Wave Regatta in which it now plays a central role, when the carefully-monitored Aqua Double-Hander was staged in July with 38 boats, it was raced round Lambay on a day of sublime sunshine which eventually may result in the summer weather of 2020 being remembered as even better than it actually was.

This was September 2020 – the Howth 17's Leila and Anita in the race round Lambay. Photo: Annraoi Blaney

Yet it was back to classic Atlantic westerlies in on some days in September when the heroically curmudgeonly veterans of the 122-year-old Howth Seventeen Class decided they'd race round Lambay on September 5th, with the winning 1907-built Deilginis seeing off the 16 miles course in a record time. This was in a race which was started in sunshine captured by rising photographic star Annraoi Blaney in a striking shot which will now be one of the style-setting photos of this brief but sweet sailing season.

They'd a longer burst of September sunshine in Howth at mid-month when the Autumn League got underway, each weekend's racing spread over both days but only one day of racing for each class, which helped social distancing as they'd 79 boats entered in all for what turned out, alas, to be just one weekend before the chop.

"Just the best day's sailing ever". Simon Knowles' J/109 Indian in hot pursuit of the Classic Half Tonners Mata, King One and Big Picture in the first (and so far only) weekend of the Howth Autumn League. Photo: Judith Malcolm

If the Dublin Shutdown really does become just a three-week imposition, then it will be everything up and running again after midnight on Friday, October 9th. But we don't see anyone betting on that, and for now, the Howth recollections of September sailing are best summed up by J/24 National Champion Sam O'Byrne, who was racing in Howth with father-and-son superstars Darren and Rocco Wright on the winning Classic Half Tonner Mata in that one opening race, with Sam subsequently commenting: "It was the best and pleasantest day of sailing I've ever had, full stop".

BELFAST LOUGH CELEBRATES DIVERSITY WITH LUFRA CUP

Up on Belfast Lough the celebration of the local sailing waters used to happen on the 12th July, when folk ashore had marching business on their mind, but those afloat at Ballyholme traditionally had a day-long race right round the lough. This was easily done thanks to conveniently placed navigation markers at every corner, such that you'd to face a course which could seem very long indeed if you were racing it in one of the 18ft Waverley Keelboats, or the 22-footers of the Bay Class.

However, that's a classic of the olden days which no longer seems to be sailed, but another Ballyholme tradition which is still going strong to celebrate the local sailing water is the Lufra Cup, which Betty Armstrong of this parish was reporting a couple of weeks ago. Nobody knows when this pursuit race – they called it the Menagerie Race until Howard Finlay presented the Lufra Cup after his 12-ton Watson cutter of that name had won in 1943 to find there as no proper cup – and ever since the Lufra Cup has been Ballyholme YC's September Classic, a race officer's nightmare and a handicapping anorak's dream, with boats streaming across the starting line in an endless procession of different starting times, and the finish seeing half a dozen boats of very different types trying to get across that line first, with a 15-ton gaff cutter winning one year, and an International Cadet winning it the next with the 15-tonner's bowsprit right over her very junior helm as he crossed the line.

Once a winner of the Lufra Cup at Ballyholme, the 1893 Dun Laoghaire-built Marie was designed by Maimie Doyle, who later designed the transom-sterned Water Wags. Photo: W M Nixon

This September it was won by Gareth Martel in his Beneteau First 40.7 Pippa, and he found himself the custodian for a year of a trophy which is a significant historical record in itself, for the inscribed list of winners going back 77 years is a history of the development of sailing of the last three-quarters of a century.

Every conceivable boat type seems to have figured at some stage, including Lasers sailed by Chris Boyd and Wic McCready, and the venerable 26ft gaff cutter Marie, designed by Maimie Doyle in Dun Laoghaire in 1893, built by her father J E Doyle, and now owned by Roy Ashton of Groomsport after a lifetime of epic sailing history which included being the first boat to be awarded the Irish Cruising Club's Faulkner Cup back in 1931.

LOUGH REE, CONNEMARA & GLANDORE

Thanks to September's sailing, we were reminded of such things, but equally, September 2020 brought together past and present and future in dynamic ways, a good example being the Jonny Swan-organised Homecoming Regatta at the 250-year-old Lough Ree Yacht Club which saw cruisers, dinghies, Shannon One Designs and SB20s finding brisk breezes and sunshine.

SB20 racing on Lough Ree with September 2020 Junior Sailor of the Month Ben Graf on the helm. Photo: Alex Hobbs

Then too, September reminded us that a thriving Flying Fifteen Class continues to develop in the heart of Connemara at Casla, with 27 boats appearing for an on-going league from all the hidden places in that totally inter-twined Land of the Sea, and Ronan O'Briain winning the two last races of September at the weekend.

A new tradition in the heartland of traditional boats? September racing for the growing fleet of Flying Fifteens at Casla in Connemara

The Flying Fifteen is not a boat type you would automatically associate with the very traditional waters of Connemara. Yet equally not everybody would think that the International Dragon is a useful youth trainer. But Don Street of Glandore on the south coast is firmly of the opinion that they are, and as Don celebrated his 90th birthday with some style among his beloved Dragons in Glandore at the end of July, his opinions deserve respect, and his programme of youth training with Dragons continued into September with some helms as young as thirteen.

You may see the Dragons racing at Glandore, but veteran skipper Don Street also sees a useful sail training flotilla….. Photo: Kathleen Hayes

However, as they lie to moorings off that most picturesque village, the Glandore Dragons have a set season, and last weekend they raced on Saturday morning, and then lifted in the afternoon to bring their season to a close. Meanwhile, for places with marinas, there are all sorts of possibilities of being able to fit in some sailing provided regulations don't become totally strict across the board.

But for now, let's just be very grateful that September has done the business to be such a very valuable part of this difficult 2020 season.

Nick Walsh's Fifty Shades was the first to finish the National 18s River Race held last night at Royal Cork Yacht Club in Cork Harbour.

The Owenabue race marked the final race of the season for the dinghy class and there was an enthusiastic turnout of all but one of the (new) designs, giving an 11-boat fleet.

The weather threw in everything for the finale; evening sunshine, dark clouds, a shower, light winds and finally a shower that brought more breeze and a rainbow.

With the tide in but ebbing the course was a beat to a weather mark, a run downwind and then a right turn into the marina in front of the RCYC clubhouse, rounding a mark back out to continue the run to leeward mark.

National 18 dinghy River Race photo slideshow below

Five race wins from eight races sailed at the 1720 Munster Championships gave overall victory to Dutch Gold skippered by Robert O'Leary sailing with his brother, Peter O'Leary, a double Olympic Star keelboat helmsman, as part of the Baltimore Sailing Club winning crew. 

The win completes a hat trick of wins for the Dutch Gold crew after victory also at the Baltimore Cup and the Southern Championships.

Second was the brother's father, Anthony, sailing with a third son, Nicholas, aboard the Royal Yacht Club entry, Antix. 

Third overall in the ten boat fleet was Dave Love's entry Mini Apple skippered by Sam Hunt.

A 40-boat cruiser-racer fleet, fine sailing breezes and autumn sunshine brought the AIB Autumn Series to life in Cork Harbour today. 

Royal Cork Yacht Club organisers staged two races on the first day of racing that continues for four more consecutive Sundays running until October 25th.

Race officer Barry Rose took charge of the Zeros, Ones and Twos assisted by Denis Kiely, Eoin Clayton, Roddy Hogan and Pauline McKechnie. Rose set two windward-leeward courses for today's racing outside of Cork Harbour.

RCYC Rear Admiral Darragh Connolly was the White Sails Race Officer with Siobhan Hoop and Dom Long assisting over today's round the cans course inside the harbour.

Next week the 1720 sportsboats (competing for Munster honours elsewhere in the harbour this weekend) will join the fray so RCYC's pre-event prediction that it will ultimately muster 50 boats proves accurate. 

Jump Juice in command in the first races of the RCYC Autumn League Photo: Bob Bateman

Jump on Top in Zero 

Two firsts for the ex-Commodore's Cupper Jump Juice skippered by Maurice O'Connell on behalf of Conor Phelan puts the Ker 37 on top in four-boat IRC Spinnaker Zero division with 2020's top-performing Grand Soleil 40, Nieulargo (Denis Murphy and Annamarie Murphy) second and Wan Waterman's X37, Saxon Senator third.

Tight at the top: Kieran Dorgan's Altair (above) leads but is on the same points as Ronan Downing's Miss Whiplash (below) Photos: Bob Bateman

 

First 36.7 Altair leads IRC Spinnaker One

Kieran Dorgan's Altair is back into Cork Harbour IRC Spinnaker One racing with a splash topping the scoresheet in the league's competitive IRC One eight-boat fleet. Altair missed the Cove Sailing Club Cobh to Blackrock Race earlier this month where she was a favourite but more than made up for it in today's performance. A win for the Cove Sailing Club First 36.7 in today's second race means she holds first overall but is on the same five points as Ronan Downing's Half-Tonner Miss Whiplash. Kieran Collins' Olsen 30, Coracle IV is one point behind in third place.

Mike McCann's Etchells 22 Don't Dilly Dally Photo: Bob Bateman

Etchells 22 First in IRC Spinnaker Two

Two wins from two races mean Mike McCann's potent Etchells 22 Don't Dilly Dally tops IRC Two from Dave Lane's J24, YaGottaWanna on six points, the same as Richard Leonard's Bolero, Bandit in third place.

Racing continues next Sunday. 

Provisional results are here

AIB Autumn Series Day One Photos By Bob Bateman

There was some great sailing breeze for a big weekend of dinghy racing at Monkstown Bay Sailing Club in Cork Harbour yesterday. MBSC is co-hosting the 1720 Munster Championships in the harbour as well as running its regular dinghy September League.

After eight races sailed in the club's September Open dinghy League 2020, Ronan Kenneally has a big lead in the Class One fleet counting six first places to lead by nine points from Brendan Dwyer also in a Laser. Philip Doherty in a Radial is third.

Lasers have a stranglehold on the leaderboard but an RS Aero (Emmet O'Sullivan) makes his presence known in the 22-boat fleet in fifth overall The first of several 505 dinghies (Brian Jones/Gary Frost) being raced at the club lies eighth overall.

In Class Two, Harry McDaid leads in a 4.7, from Tony Geraghty in an Optimist. Third is  Kyle Joyce in a Feva.

Results are here

Bob Bateman's MBSC September Series Photo Gallery below