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Displaying items by tag: Tom Shanahan

2nd July 2019

Tom Shanahan of the National YC is Junior “Sailor of the Month” for June

Dun Laoghaire’s Shanahan family J/109 Ruth

The Dun Laoghaire to Dingle Race is now such a significant event that inevitably it attracts the involvement of professional and semi-professional talent. But so many boats sail determinedly within the Corinithian ideal that in effect they created an extra Division within the race. No boat better typified this than Dun Laoghaire’s Shanahan family with their J/109 Ruth, where they deferred to one of the youngest on board - 19-year-old Tom Shanahan - as skipper. He called the shots very well indeed, with Ruth taking over the lead in the J/109s at the Fastnet, and handling the tricky beat from there to the finish so well that they placed a close fourth overall in the total fleet, and clear Corinthian winners.

Published in Sailor of the Month

Tagged under

William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago