RYA Northern Ireland’s Women On Water Festival will take place at the Royal North of Ireland Yacht Club in Cultra on Sunday 12 May and online sign-ups are now open to women across Northern Ireland and the wider island of Ireland.

“You don’t have to have taken part in a Women On Water programme before,” RYANI club coordinator Lisa McCaffrey makes clear. “It’s just an opportunity for anyone to get out on the water and meet like-minded people who love nature and love being out on the water.”

The RYA website has more on the festival and the wider Women On Water programme HERE.

Three-time Olympian and 2016 ILCA World Champion Alison Young will provide coaching for Northern Ireland sailors at RYA Northern Ireland’s ‘Female Focused Camp’ at Ballyholme Yacht Club on the weekend of 27-28 April.

The camp is specifically targeted for junior and youth performance pathway women and girls, who will benefit from elite-level coaching from Young as well as CPD training from Robyn Phillips of RYA Scotland, who boasts extensive coaching experience of her own.

RYANI says the camp — which will comprise the Topper, Feva, ILCA and 29er classes — is central to its five-year strategy, Navigating The Future, as well as its pilot Project Theia which includes a Women on Water development programme.

Spaces for the weekend are very limited and bookings are being taken on a first come, first served basis. For more on the coaching camp and how to take part, see the RYA website HERE.

Whatever you may think about the historic gun-running by Erskine & Molly Childers’ Asgard into Howth on July 26th 1914, there’s no denying the fact that this was one of the most significant interactions of sailing as a sport with Irish national life in its most all-embracing form. Indeed, there is perhaps only one other sailing-related happening which has totally lodged itself so enduringly in the national consciousness, and that is the August 2016 arrival of Annalise Murphy into the National Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire with her sailing Silver Medal, won at the Rio Olympics. It was an occasion of purest shared joy which chimed perfectly with the sense of a country finally emerging from the economic recession of 2009-2012.

That velvet summer night of nationally-shared Dun Laoghaire celebration simply took it for granted that it was a woman sailor who had made all this possible. Yet in drawing any comparisons with the singular events of 102 years earlier, so much is under consideration that it is easy to overlook another key fact. It was a woman sailor who helmed Asgard throughout the tricky manoeuvre which brought the ketch and her important cargo safely alongside Howth’s East Pier to affect the course of history.

National joy – Annalise Murphy returns to Dun Laoghaire with her Olympic Medal

Molly Alden Osgood Childers was usually at the helms of Asgard during difficult manoeuvres. Of Boston sailing stock, she was nine years senior to her relative, the noted yacht designer and successful offshore racing pioneer John Alden. Partially disabled as a result of a childhood skating accident, she turned her limited mobility to advantage by making herself a brilliant helmswoman, while her husband and the other men and women on board attended to the more athletic needs of line handing and sail setting.

TWO OUTSTANDING WOMEN-HELMED EVENTS

Thus these two outstanding sailing-related events spread over a century and more of Irish national awareness both have quietly capable and very effective women sailors at their core. And while it could be argued that between them there came the arguably equally significant global circumnavigation of male sailor Conor O’Brien with Saoirse in 2023-2925, can we honestly claim that the voyage of the Saoirse is lodged in the national consciousness in the same way as the achievements of Molly Childers and Annalise Murphy?

For sure, the Saoirse voyage’s completion was very big news at the time. But in truth, it was something of a nine-day wonder, and the carefully-envisaged and restrained celebrations being planned to mark the Centenary of O’Brien’s departure next month, his actual rounding of Cape Horn in December 1924, and his subsequent return to Dun Laoghaire on June 20th 1925, suggests that this is an achievement whose significance has to be explained at every turn, whereas “Asgard” and “Olympic Medal” are all that needs to be said about the woman-centric sailing highlights of 1914 and 2016.

THE WOMEN WHO SAVED O’BRIEN FROM HIMSELF

And in any case, when push came to shove, it was often strong and capable women who extracted Conor O’Brien from self-inflicted difficulties. The poet Robert Graves has recorded how O’Brien’s sister Kitty’s no-nonsense approach was sometimes the saving of everyone when O’Brien’s recklessness and nervousness got them into difficulties while mountaineering in North Wales.

The calming presence. The amiable and easygoing Kitty O’Brien at the helm of Kelpie in 1913, while brother Conor sedates himself with a pipe of tobacco

Equally, when O’Brien had sold his Dublin house to buy his first sea-going yacht, the heavy old ketch Kelpie, the photos on board off Ireland's west coast, as likely as not, will have Kitty calmly at the helm. Then as the Saoirse round-the-world voyage drew towards a close with the Azores reached and Ireland beckoning, O’Brien’s short temper meant that any credibility he had in the crew-recruiting department had evaporated, so it was Kitty who went through the then-lengthy process of getting to the Azores in order to help him complete the final 1200 miles home.

Afterwards, it was his sadly brief marriage to Kitty Clausen which turned O’Brien into something more closely resembling a normal human being, and their cruises in the Mediterranean – with Kitty playing a key role as crew, helm, cook and floating home-maker - were undoubtedly O’Brien’s happiest years.

Happy days. Conor O’Brien and his new wife Kitty Clausen combine forces to send Saoirse’s heavy sails aloft. Typically of O’Brien, he regarded the use of chain as a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem of halyard chafe.

Is this sense of women sailors being equal - or even superior - with men in significant sailing experiences something which occurred more in Ireland than anywhere else? In previous issues, we have highlighted how, in 1894, the new magazine Yachting World ran a supposedly saucy feature about the women sailors of the Water Wag class in Dublin Bay. But closer examination revealed that, far from being a sort of Victorian nautical version of Page 3 girls, these were serious and successful sailors who just happened to be women.

THE POWERHOUSE THAT WAS MAIMIE DOYLE

At the same time, everyone knew that the real creative design talent behind the James Doyle boat-building enterprise in what was then Kingstown was his daughter Maimie, whose designs not only continue to sail the sea, but they’re even still being new-built in the case of her 1900 version of the Water Wag.

The 52ft cutter Granuaile designed by Maimie Doyle in 1905, and built in Dun Laoghaire by her father James Doyle. An able seaboat, Granuaile voyaged to Australia and is now based in Tasmania 

CRUISING CLUB WOMEN

Then when the Irish Cruising Club was formed in 1929, in drawing up the rules it never seems to have occurred to the founders that women should in any way be excluded. So much so, in fact, that the Club’s Faulkner Cup of 1931 establishment – the first major annual cruising award in Ireland - was to be won twice by women members in the 1930s – Elizabeth Crimmins in 1934 and Daphne French in 1939 – while more recently a rounding of Cape Horn has featured in its award to Maire Breathnach of Dungarvan.

The 9-ton Albert Strange-designed yawl Nirvana of Arklow, built by Jack Tyrrell in Arklow in 1925. In 1934 she was skippered by Elizabeth Crimmins of East ferry, Cork Harbour to become the first woman winner of the Irish Cruising Club’s Faulkner Cup

As for successful women sailors in the wider Irish racing scene, the list goes on and on from club racing right up to Olympic level, so much so that my own experience is that you find you feel you’re racing against the boat in question, and whether or not it emerges that it happens to have a female helm at race’s end is neither here nor there.

Nevertheless if examples are insisted on, just reflect on the fact that the co-skipper of the current ISORA Champion, the J/109 Mojito, is Vicky Cox of Pwllheli. In Ireland it may well be that this state of affairs is simply taken for granted as being normal, but perhaps in Wales they still sense an air of exceptionalism about it.

Vicky Cox racing ISORA Champion Mojito off Pwllheli

WELCOME RE-PUBLICATION OF WOMAN SOLO TRANSAT BOOK

Such thoughts are occasioned by the recent-re-publication of an almost forgotten book about solo sailing achievement by a woman. Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s When I Put Out To Sea initially appeared in 1972, after she had become the first woman to sail non-stop solo direct from a northwest European harbour to Newport, Rhode Island in 1971 an often upwind distance of 4,000 miles made good in 44 days.

There are those who would argue that it was Ann Davison with the 23ft Felicity Ann in 1952 who achieved the “first”. But the able little Mashford of Plymouth timber-built Felicity Ann coasted along the shores of northwest Europe to several ports before making the much shorter Transatlantic hop across from the Canaries to the Caribbean. Thus the initially low-key story of Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s non-stop crossing with Aziz in 1971 is rather different.

Clever cover. The re-publication of Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s When I Put Out To Sea works well on several levels. We may not be immediately aware of it, but subconscious heft is given by the title taken from Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar – Hemingway was a master at this “title-borrowing” technique. And though the cover photo may look ordinary enough, half a minute’s thoughtful consideration of it is a forceful reminder of just how relatively primitive was universally-used boat and navigation equipment only fifty years ago. And on top of all that, the book’s handy acronym is WIPOTS – it’s unforgettable.

It was fifty-two years ago when a blue van de Stadt-designed glassfibre-built Pionier 9 – just a slip of a boat by today’s standards – sailed away from the anchorage at Dale close inside the entrance to Milford Haven in southwest Wales. When she finally berthed again 44 days later, it was to be at Newport in Rhode island after sailing just on 4,000 miles through the water.

Yet although this little boat Aziz had sailed between some of the islands in the Azores archipelago, she hadn’t stopped or had any local contact, and thus in Rhode Island it was justifiably claimed that the skipper, 28-year-old Nicolette Milnes-Walker, was the first female sailor to make the complete east-west Transatlantic passage non-stop.

DUNMORE EAST, THE HOSPITABLE GLUE-POT HARBOUR

The fact that Milnes-Walker, whose supportive family hail from Cheshire, comes across as being so utterly grounded, so “normal”, is part of the fascination of her story. For some reason, one day she just got hold of the idea of doing the voyage. She did some training with Peter Pattinson’s little sailing and cruising school in Southwest Wales in Milford Haven. This inevitably involved convivial visits across channel to Ireland and the glue-pot harbour of Dunmore East, with its hyper-hospitable Waterford Harbour Sailing Club, and the boisterous late feasts in the Ocean Hotel. Survive that, and you could survive anything.

“Just keep on sailing, and you’ll get there”. Rory O’Hanlon’s famous advice to the then-neophyte John Gore-Grimes before his first long voyage springs to mind as we contemplate the very sensible little Pionier 9 Aziz departing from Milford Haven on Saturday 12th June 1971. 44 days and 4000 non-stop miles later, Nicolette Milnes-Walker and Aziz were in Newport. Rhode Island

At an early stage with some experience gained, she’d pooled her resources and found a used but well-loved Pionier 9 in the Solent at the right price, and got the show on the road. This adds an extra significance to an already intriguing story, as the Pionier 9 as an all-fibreglass concept may have appeared as early as 1955 to be the first such boat in Europe - a typical Ricus van de Stadt concept breakthrough. But it wasn’t until 1959 that Frank King and his team at Southern Ocean Shipyards in Poole put her into production, and in the almost de rigeur promotional debut gesture of the time, they immediately won the Round the Island Race overall.

SOUND THINKING IN BOAT SELECTION

Thus the selection of the boat by Nicolette Milnes-Walker clearly demonstrates the soundness of her thinking and general approach, as the Pionier 9’s seaworthiness had been further demonstrated in very active RORC racing.

Yet when the book of the voyage When I Put Out To Sea was subsequently published, with Aziz being put on display in the Earls Court Boat Show in London by the builders, the yachting establishment - as evidenced through the sailing print media - seems to have been a bit sniffy about the whole business as being a lightly-planned and rather casual adventure, even if the provenly-serious sailors such as Robin Knox-Johnston had no hesitation in acknowledging the achievement.

Support from the man who matters – Robin Knox-Johnston with Nicolette Milnes-Walker in 1972

NEGATIVE SAILING MEDIA ATTITUDE

But as for much of the sailing media, if anything when they did register the story – for some ignored the book altogether - their attitude seems to have been that it all should be forgotten about as soon as possible, as it might have a dangerous inspirational effect on impressionable young people of both sexes, and particularly on attention–seeking young women.

More than fifty years later, we have come through such a change of attitudes towards women in sailing that we almost feel sorry for those male dinosaurs who were clinging like limpets to such viewpoints back in 1971. And as we were arguing earlier, perhaps in Ireland we’ve always had a more sensible attitude to women sailors in the first place.

But as well in Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s case, her remarkable voyage may have became part of her life, but it didn’t dominate or define it. As soon as the voyage and its brief post-achievement razzmatazz had died down with the Americans making much of it and greatly emphasising the fact she was a woman, she retreated to a country cottage in Cornwall with her literary agent Bruce Coward to create a book out of her log and hotch-potch of personal notes.

And when that was done, they found they’d become an item and spent some of the early years of their married life living and working in London and starting a family. But the coast and the sea called, and when a bookshop business in Dartmouth came up for sale, they bought it.

Dartmouth in Devon. Until the recent re-publication of When I Put Out To Sea, most of her fellow members in the local sailing club were unaware that the dinghy-racing neighbourhood bookseller Nicolette Milnes-Walker had once upon a time established a notable first in Transatlantic sailing 

ETHEREAL STORY

Reader, this is where the story becomes really ethereal. The bookshop owner was Christopher Milne. Or more properly Christopher Robin Milne, son of A A Milne and the young hero, along with sundry superstar humanized animals, of his father’s much-loved Winnie-the-Pooh children’s books.

It was such a psychologically complex situation that it made a very good film, well capturing the fact that the best way Christopher Robin could preserve his own identity was by becoming the semi-anonymous village book-seller in Dartmouth, far indeed from the little East Suseex river where the Pooh Sticks had been raced under the bridge.

BACK TO LOCAL SAILING AND NOW RE-PUBLICATION

Into this scenario stepped Bruce and Nicolette Milnes-Walker Coward and their family. She may have been almost hiding the fact that once upon a time she sailed the Atlantic solo, but years earlier at Dale on Milford Haven she’d savoured that special social scene which is ordinary club sailing, and in Dartmouth as the neighbourhood book-seller she has been able to rejoin it, becoming a stalwart performer in the local sailing club.

And now, fifty years and more have elapsed since the voyage of the wonderful Aziz, tangible evidence of the fact that Ricus van de Stadt may well have been the most important yacht designer in the world in the late 1950s, and that in 1971 there was much more to the Nicolette Milnes-Walker story than at first met the eye.

She certainly lived up to her name. Although production of the Pionier 9 did not begin in Poole until 1959, it s believed that designer Ricus van de Stadt had the concept in place in 1955

So Julia Jones of Suffolk, a determined promoter of women’s sailing achievements, has re-published When I Put Out To Sea under her Golden Duck imprint golden-duck.co.uk. It’s a very effective book title which works well at several levels, and if you want to feel young again and re-vitalise your joy in sailing and slightly reckless youthful adventure, just buy it and read it and then read it again.

OUT-OF-DATE OFFICIAL ATTITUDES

Meanwhile, here we are in 2023, and frankly, the official attitudes and notions about women’s sailing are woefully out of date. So much so, in fact, that we now feel exasperation at people who are continually promoting various initiatives to encourage women afloat, when any look at something like last month’s Youth Nationals in Howth shows that the Women Going Sailing Train left the station quite some time ago, and has long been going full speed as a fully-accepted part of the sailing scene.

In fact, far from the attitude of ordinary harmless male sailors to their female counterparts being a matter for concern and re-education, it could well be that the uneven and unhealthy situation is to be found elsewhere.

After she’d achieved permanent stardom through her Olympic medal, Annalise Murphy was invited to join the all-women crew of a Volvo Racer for a leg or two of the Round the World Race, theoretically in a helming role.

Into the jungle….Annalise Murphy getting to grips with steering a Volvo Ocean Racer

The idea that somebody – however talented - can step straight from the rarefied and specialist solo position of a Laser helm into the street-fighting slugfest of steering a Volvo boat suggests that the organisers were chasing stardust rather than seriously putting together a viable performance package.

RESISTANCE OF THE ESTABLISHED SAILING SISTERHOOD

But the most thought-provoking outcome of the experience for Annalise was that after the semi-schoolgirl camaraderie of the Laser/Ilca circuit, the Volvo Ocean Race scene – whether male or female – was complete and utter jungle. The women’s boat in particular had some hardened veterans at the core of the crew who were totally and aggressively contemptuous of imported talent from a different sailing discipline, and weren’t afraid to say so with a vocabulary that threatened to melt the boat’s fancy carbon construction.

So maybe in trying to encourage women newly into sailing, it’s the established Sisterhood which is as much of a problem as the few remaining redoubts of male stuffiness. Either way, I have to admit to finding the entire Women on Water movement an embarrassment which may well be able to draw down some quite impressive government funding, but seems very artificial in a world where capable women have been paying a leading role afloat ever since Mrs Noah had to take command of The Ark in view of her eccentric husband’s persistent inebriation.

TIME FOR NEW “MEN ON WATER” MOVEMENT

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that far from giving our support to WoW, we should be rallying round a new organisation to be called MoW. Men on Water. For when I think of all the superb women sailors I’ve known and still know, it would make my blood boil (if it weren’t for my cold-blooded reptilian characteristics) to think of the underlying patronising contempt inherent in some movement which presumes to think that Irish women sailors or would-be sailors need special support to get afloat.

There is ample evidence that there is a real need for a properly funded “Men on Water” initiative

Yet all round our coasts, there are harbours filled with old (and not-so-old) fellows impoverished by the fact that they are now in straitened circumstances, thanks to a lifetime of maintaining boats to the high standard expected by our formidable women sailors.

Men on Water will give tangible support to these saintly male characters. And if there’s no money left after just two or three deserving veterans have been properly re-funded, then so be it.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of the development of sailing in Ireland – particularly from 1890 onwards – will be aware that women sailors played an active role afloat in this country’s sailing boat sport for a long time. For how could it be otherwise in an island nation which produced the great sea queen Granuaille? Admittedly, most of the ancient organisations in sailing appeared to have a sometimes totally male dominance in their membership requirements and general administration. But nevertheless, a significant element in the more forward-thinking sectors in the sport provided women with an at least equal role, even if some of the dinosaurs on the male side liked to think that their gender – and they themselves in particular – were the all-powerful hubs of the universe.

Yet as sailing historian Hal Sisk has pointed out, in the latter half of the 19th Century, Dublin Bay was the cradle of yacht racing development. The proper codification of racing rules which eventually achieved global acceptance, and the development of one-design racing, which now seems such an obviously important part of our sport, both emanated from what was then Kingstown Harbour from the 1880s onwards.

This is now…..Thomas Gautier’s photo of Aoife Hopkins in her Laser as she hops the Atlantic seas off Douarnenez in Brittany perfectly captures the spirit of Irish women’s sailing today. Photo: Thomas Gautier 

Much of the earliest development came from the 1887-founded Dublin Bay Water Wags. They started originally with a lug-rigged spinnaker-setting double-ended 13ft open clinker-built dinghy, but in 1900 they changed to a more robust 14ft transom-sterned clinker-built boat which still sails today, with the active numbers of 2022 going through sail number 50 for the first time, with a newly-built boat for Mandy Chambers. 

Showing the flag on Lough Ree – the Dublin Bay Water Wags in their 1900 incarnation were designed by Maimie Doyle

That this milestone number was achieved by a female owner-skipper has not been a matter of comment at all. But then this is in keeping with the class ethos, which was set by the fact that the “new” boat back in 1900 had been designed by Maimie Doyle, the yacht-designing daughter of Dun Laoghaire boat-builder James Doyle. She was prodigiously gifted, and her largest creation, the 52ft Granuaile of 1905, is still sailing in Tasmania.

But unfortunately for the spirit and energies of fresh thinking in Dublin Bay sailing, when Maimie Doyle got married early in the 1900s, she went to live in Galway. Yet for fifteen and more years from around 1890 onwards, her rudimentary “office” in the Doyle yard was the centre of wide-ranging discussions on all marine topics and many other issues of the day. For as one writer of the time remarked, she was “very sound” on the national question, and thus her discussions with some of her father’s more establishment-minded clients could often get quite lively.

The lines of the 52ft Granuaile as designed by Maimie Doyle in 1905

Indeed, it was said that her impromptu weekly debates in the office with a Major Richardson were the best entertainment in town. This meant it was doubly ironic that the fervently nationalist Maimie Doyle looked after much of the paperwork involved in her father’s construction in 1903 of the Dublin Bay 25 Fodhla for the Viceroy, Lord Dudley. But business is business, and anyway as sailing historian Vincent Delany has recalled, the early 1900s were a hyper-active time for Water Wag expansion, and Maimie Doyle was keen to successfully encourage as much active female participation as possible.

That was 122 years ago, and it is an attitude which has quietly yet very definitely permeated much of Irish sailing ever since. Thus certain recent national developments in sailing regarding female participation are frankly bewildering for anyone with the slightest knowledge of the everyday history of our sport. 

The brash new magazine Yachting World in July 1894 devoted a two-page photo feature to the female sailors of the Dublin Bay Water Wag Class Courtesy: Clare McComb

The second page of the Yachting Word feature gives some idea of the busy state of Dublin Bay sailing at the time – the schooner winning the Cruiser race is Ross Todd’s Comas. Courtesy: Clare McComb

COSSETING IS AN INSULT TO FEMALE SAILORS

Thus It looks to us as though today’s maritime-minded women of Ireland are getting a very raw deal. They’re being treated as some sort of inferior species that can’t even think of going near a boat without the support of various well-meaning initiatives, of which the apparently well-resourced and doubtless well-meaning Women-on-Water movement is the most conspicuous.

Yet it seems to exist on the hypothesis that our sailing women, or would-be sailing women, are delicate flowers who need to be nurtured, cosseted and encouraged in every way possible in order to get them into a boat. And to add further insult, its existence suggests that those many women sailors from throughout Ireland who have already made it to the top on their own abilities over many decades are some sort of freaks.

Putting aside imagined gender requirements for a moment, this is an entirely mistaken approach for a sport like sailing as it affects everyone - male, female or transgender. For sailing can experience demanding and sometimes dangerous situations which are part of each day’s activity afloat. Thus in reaching out to encourage people to take up sailing, we have to look at it in two ways.

Even before the first version of the Water Wags arrived in 1887, all-female crew were to be found sailing with the pioneering dinghy clubs in Killiney Bay, as seen in this photo from the mid-1880s. Photo Vincent Delany courtesy Michael Geoghegan 

NEWCOMERS TO SAILING SHOULD BE IN A TWO-WAY PROCESS

For sure, if there’s a genuine spark there, then let’s encourage it. But we should always be aware that there’s an equal requirement that potential sailors will be people of drive and energy who will be resourceful in any challenging situation, and will also tend to wonder what they can do for sailing every bit as much as they’re curious about what sailing can do for them.

In other words, what will they bring to the party? So it’s only an extra element being added to this complex situation when a song and dance is made about gender. Sailing in Ireland in particular has long been a welcoming place for women participants, provided they are contributors as much as consumers. And although some of the older organisations with bricks-and-mortar clubhouses have had a silly fuddy-duddy attitude to the gender thing, the more enlightened and influential sailing organisations in Ireland have been notably gender blind for a very long time.

Thus it was almost embarrassing this year when the Dublin Bay Water Wags agreed to make one of their race nights a Women-on-Water occasion, as virtually every Water Wag race is a women on water event already. But they just don’t make a thing of it, as it’s perfectly normal for them.

Water Wag female sailors gather in the National YC in acknowledgement of the Women on Water initiative. Yet most of them are already experienced sailors and racers, and the photo includes (top) Annalise Murphy (Silver Medal 2016 Sailing Olympics) and Cathy Mac Aleavey (left) 470 Helm in the 1988 Olympics

And though in the Victorian era there was a certain primness about “lady sailors” in the Water Wags - as mildly exploited by the new magazine Yachting World in 1894 - the fact of the matter is that women helms have been winning races in the Water Wags for years, they continue to do so, and we’re obliged to multiple boat enthusiast Vincent Delany for furnishing information on this time-honoured Water Wag interaction with female sailors.

Daphne French’s ketch Embla, awarded the Irish Cruising Club Faulkner Cup in 1939. In 1935 she and her friend Betty Parsons sailed to Australia from Dublin in the Eriksson Tall Ship Pamir, and returned via Cape Horn in another square rigger, L’Avenir. Although they were initially taken on as stewardesses, by mid-voyage they were being allowed aloft. In 1939. now owner-skipper of Embla, she voyaged with a mostly female crew to the Aland Islands in the Baltic, the home of the Eriksson fleet, where she met many former Cape Horn shipmates. Embla returned to Ireland just before the outbreak of World War II, and was very deservedly awarded the Faulkner Cup

Equally, the 1929-founded Irish Cruising Club had nothing whatever in its rules about women and men being treated differently in any way in the club’s membership and in all its activities. Its increasingly prestigious premier trophy for successful voyaging, the Faulkner Cup inaugurated in 1931, was awarded to Elizabeth Crimmins of East Ferry in Cork Harbour in 1934, to Daphne French in 1939, and other women members since, a notable example being Maire Breathnath of Dungarvan, who received the Faulkner Cup for a Cape Horn cruise in 2004. And she gives as she takes - these days, she’s also Editor of the Irish Cruising Club Annual, that vital compilation of narrative and information which continues to move this key element of sailing forward.

Maire Breathnath of Dungarvan off Cape Horn in 2004

More recently, the proliferation of club racing with marina-accessible cruisers and the way that crew might be assembled locally at the last minute has meant, at least in my experience, that you’re racing against boats rather than helmspersons. In thirty and more active years of cruiser club racing, we might find that at the finish it so happened our boat had been well and truly beaten by a boat helmed by a woman. But it happened so often that we thought nothing of it, for what was the big deal? This was boat-for-boat stuff, and nobody expected special treatment on either side.

Knowing that people would doubt this situation, I started to make a list of the woman sailing star helms and tacticians who have given our boats a solid beating in various hard-fought races over the years. But when the list got to a dozen with many more to come, I realized this was a pointless and patronising exercise, a case of dancing against the self-pitying tune played by the Women on Water lobby.

THE BIGGER PICTURE IS PREDOMINANTLY FEMALE OLYMPIC SUCCESS

In the bigger picture, if it weren’t for female sailors, Ireland wouldn’t have been considered a serious contender in the Sailing Olympics for two decades now. And it’s a trend which is continuing. But as we have an extremely unhealthy tendency to hang all our hopes to an excessive and stressful degree on some new and emerging talent – whether male or female – I’m simply not going to mention those young stars who have done great things afloat already, and may well do much more in the year ahead.

Meanwhile, the drum-beating goes on about encouraging female sailing by every artificial initiative imaginable. At its most visible level, this has involved racing days at certain clubs where the boats must carry an all-female crew, or at least comply with a minimum proportion of women sailors aboard.

NEW MEANING FOR “DRAG RACING”

In my own home club, the phoneyness of this rings out like a raucous alarm bell. We have boats helmed by successful women sailors who are crewed by men or women or both. We have some successful male helms who would be quite lost unless they were crewed entirely by females. But the idea of achieving an arbitrarily-set gender balance in order to get your club qualified for an admittedly very tangible reward is frankly embarrassing, yet the word is that the response in one club which was rather keen to qualify resulted in an entirely new definition of “drag racing”.

Harry Heist’s classic S&S 41 Winsome looks at first glance to be traditional all-male territory……

…..yet as soon as you see into the cockpit, you realise that the boss on the helm is Ireland’s multi-success Laura Dillon

It’s an absurd state of affairs. When we consider the Olympic Silver Medal success of Annalise Murphy in 2016 and her mother Cathy Mac Aleavey’s Olympic participation in 1988, and add to that the achievements of Aoife Hopkins and Eve McMahon and Laura Dillon and others, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that the Women-on-Water funding should be entirely re-allocated.

Yes indeed. It is surely time that we had a fully-resourced Men-on-Water initiative to help the members of this less competent and more sensitive gender to up their game afloat. And we can be sure they’ll get enthusiastically involved, but only if their wives or girlfriends tell them to do so.

RYA Northern Ireland is looking for the next location to host its popular Women on Water (WOW) Festival.

As previously reported on Afloat.ie, the WOW initiative began in 2016, allowing over 500 women to get on the water with 12 clubs supporting the programme.

The annual festival helps to support and grow female participation in boating. It also helps those who take part to develop skills and water awareness, as well as improving their health and wellbeing.

There are usually opportunities to get on the water, as well as workshops and interesting talks from speakers.

Previous festivals have seen participants come together from across Northern Ireland – some who are new to the sport and trying it for the first time as well as lifelong sailors.

RYANI’s active clubs coordinator Lisa McCaffrey says: “The Women on Water Festival is a fantastic event each year for so many people and it has gone from strength to strength. It gives likeminded people an opportunity to take part in something they truly enjoy.

“The last two years has been difficult for so many people and the festival will provide a great opportunity to reconnect with club members, new participants and volunteers.

“The buzz is energising and in previous years we’ve heard some fantastic stories from people who have come along – they have all been through a brilliant experience together and this is the time to celebrate all that they’ve achieved.”

Lisa adds: “We are now asking clubs to complete an expression of interest form if they are keen to help organise and host the Festival with the help of our enthusiastic WOW Leader Group.”

The deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday 1 April and clubs can apply online. For further information, email Lisa McCaffrey.

RYA Northern Ireland is calling for women across Northern Ireland to give feedback on its Women on Water programme.

The governing body hopes to find out what boaters want through a development survey, which will help to shape future programmes.

The Women on Water initiative began in 2016, allowing over 500 female participants to get on the water and 12 clubs supporting the programme.

RYA Northern Ireland’s active clubs co-ordinator Lisa McCaffrey said: “To expand the Women on Water programme we want to find out about our boaters aspirations.

“We are calling on as many female boaters as possible to complete the 10-minute survey so that we can find out exactly what will work best.

“The programme has been extremely successful over the last three years and we are now working on progressing Women on Water with the aim of developing our female workforce. We hope to provide a programme that helps support the development of RYA coaches/officials and instructors.

“This is an exciting opportunity to assist our boating community with increasing their skills and qualifications.”

Over the last three years, participants of the Women on Water programme have had many achievements, including:

• A Women on Water Leader Group who organise and run a Women on Water Festival and help to support the development of the programme at clubs across Northern Ireland.
• At Strangford Lough Yacht Club, six women completed the Women on Water programme in June 2018 and went on to win the regatta series at their club in the same year.
• Two Women on Water graduates were due to take part in their first GP14 class World Championship in 2020.
• One participant is going on to become an Advanced Powerboat Instructor.
• Many of the graduates regularly volunteer at their clubs on committees, as well as being race officials and providing event support.

McCaffrey added: “RYA Northern Ireland is asking for any female that is involved in boating in Northern Ireland to take part in the survey, whether you have been a lifelong boater, completed a Women on Water programme since 2016 or a sailing course, we want to hear from you.”

Click HERE to complete the Women on Water survey for RYANI.

The second Women on Water Festival will take place at Carrickfergus Sailing Club with Belfast Lough Sailability on 6 June 2020, bringing together women from right across NI as they take to the water.

The first festival was held in September 2019 and was a huge success. Around 50 women gathered at Strangford Lough Yacht Club, from first-timers to lifelong sailors.

The festival is open to like-minded women who have been involved in sailing from a young age or as part of the recent Women on Water programmes.

The Women on Water programme runs at clubs across Northern Ireland and sees women taking part in a four-week programme to learn the basics of sailing, as well as making new friends along the way. It is a low cost programme and is open to women of all abilities.

RYA Northern Ireland’s Active Clubs co-ordinator Lisa McCaffrey explains: “It is fantastic to now have the date for the next Women on Water Festival marked firmly in the diary. Last year was an uplifting and inspirational day with women coming together to share memories of their times on the water, and to make new ones.

“It is a fantastic way for women to try out sailing and to get involved in something which is not only good for physical health but also for mental health and for creating a new social circle with like-minded people.”

Feedback from last year’s festival was positive, with one participant stating: “Women on Water has been a changing point for me and is an amazing project. I’m heading out today with another Women on Water participant and I’m handing my membership papers into my club. I’m definitely at the start of something new.”

Lisa McCaffrey comments: “Following the feedback from last year’s festival, there was no option but to run another festival this year and we are looking forward to welcoming new and returning participants. We have decided to run it over summer so that the participants can return to their local club and get some more sailing done before winter.

“This programme breaks down many barriers and it is so good to learn about our participant’s stories, we are so glad that Women on Water has been an avenue for them to accomplish their goals.”

Debbie Nelson from Carrickfergus Sailing Club comments: " Carrickfergus Sailing Club and Belfast Lough Sailability are absolutely delighted to be hosting the second Women on Water festival. We have always thoroughly enjoyed past Women on Water sessions. This will be a fantastic opportunity for like-minded women to get together, experience sailing, meet new friends and most importantly laugh until our tummy’s ache!"

The Women on Water programme is the first step of the sailing pathway for females in Northern Ireland. Previous graduates are now part of their club committees and some are on the pathway to competing at national and world events.

There are a number of clubs running Women on Water programmes. For more information contact [email protected]

The RYANI is calling on sailing clubs across Northern Ireland to bid to become host of the 2020 Women on Water Festival.

Following the success of the first-ever Women on Water Festival at Strangford Lough Yacht Club as part of the 2019 programme, the RYANI has announced that the next festival will take place this summer.

Active clubs co-ordinator Lisa McCaffrey says: “We were delighted with the success of last year’s Women on Water Festival and are looking forward to another great weekend in summer 2020.

“We hope to run the festival in June, which will allow participants to continue boating at their local club throughout the summer. This will also provide an opportunity for clubs to gain new members.

Lisa says the Women on Water programme, which was launched in 2016, “is a fantastic programme to get more females out on the water trying different water based activities”.

She adds: “The festival brought females from all experiences, from first-timers to lifelong participants, and allowed them to try out five different activities including dinghy sailing, yachting, powerboating, stand up paddleboarding.

“There were also informative workshops which allowed the participants to gain more knowledge about our sport and Northern Ireland’s waters.”

Clubs looking to host the 2020 WOW festival are now being invited to complete the expression of interest form by Friday 28 February. For more information contact [email protected] or call 07788238083.

Marking International Women’s Day last Friday (8 March), RYANI launched its popular Women on Water programme for 2019.

The initiative, which sees women of all abilities take to the water, is being run in conjunction with a number of sailing clubs right across Northern Ireland.

Women taking part in the four-week programme will learn the basic skills of sailing, as well as meeting many new friends along the way.

RYANI’s active clubs co-ordinator Lisa McCaffrey said: “We have now been running the Women on Water programme for four years and it continues to grow from strength to strength.

“Sailing is a fun-filled sport but as our past participants have learned, there are many other health benefits. It is a fantastic stress-buster, helps us to keep fit and is a great way to learn some new skills.

“The programme is open to all – you don’t need to be a member of a club already and you don’t need to have any sailing experience. This is a chance to get out on the water and have some fun.”

Any NI women interested in finding out more can complete this expression of interest form online.

Women on Water at the National Yacht Club are entering two 1720 Sportboats in the DBSC Turkey Shoot — and you could be a part of the action.

Experienced women sailors will have their own boat (€100pp) but those newer to racing won’t be left out as a second vessel will have a coach on board (€150pp).

The Turkey Shoot series, now sponsored by Citroen South Dublin, will run for seven Sundays from 4 November.

Women also have the option of sailing Wayfarers in the DMYC Frostbites in the afternoons (€100pp).

And Women on Water are running a coaching session on Saturday 3 November to familiarise those taking part with the 1720 and Wayfarer boats.

Register online at the NYC website HERE.