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Displaying items by tag: Tour de BelleIle

Dun Laoghaire offshore sailor Kenny Rumball has won his class in the Tour de Belle-Ile Race onboard the Open 7.50m 'Cool Runnings'.

Rumball, the owner/operator of the Irish National Sailing School in Dun Laoghaire, was crewing onboard the Jochem Visser skippered yacht with Thorkild Juncker and Tom Whitburn. Rumball told Afloat.ie he found the big 500–boat French race fleet 'hard to comprehend'. See vid above. 

The Tour de Belle-Ile is a sailing event created in 2008 and open to all sailing yachts measuring 6,50 metres or more, and is the French equivalent of the UK's Round the Island Race.

The Tour de Belle-Ile is around 41 nautical miles: starting from the middle of the bay of Quiberon (Brittany, France), rounding of Belle Île leaving the island to port and returning to the departure/finish line. 

A month ago, Rumball finished sixth overall at Spi Ouest regatta in western France, on the same boat. 

Published in Offshore

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