The up-grading of the RORC's annual Caribbean 600 race to what is effectively a two-week inshore/offshore festival in February 2023, when the sailing in the area is at its brisk but warm best, is a reminder that Irish boats and crews have been in there since the start in 2009 of
what initially seemed like a slightly wacky idea.
For although the established 600-700 mile classics such as the Bermuda Race, the Fastnet Race, the Sydney-Hobart, the Middle Sea and the Round Ireland have relatively straightforward courses, in order to break the 600-mile ceiling, the slighty eccentric Antigua Sailing Brains Trust came up with a cat's cradle of a course, intertwining so many island and large rock turning points that some of the bigger boats carried two navigators, just to be sure to be sure.
Howth contingent in Antigua - Michael Wright and ex-pat superstar Gordon Maguire before the start of the Caribbean 600. Photo: Brian Turvey
But immediately it was proposed, Adrian Lee of Royal St George YC in Dun Laoghaire was much taken with the idea. He had recently bought Ger O'Rourke of Limerick's Cookson 50 Chieftain, overall winner in the 2007 Fastnet Race and high scorer or winner in several other majors. Yet by February 2009 there she was in Antigua, ready to go as Lee Overlay Partners with a totally fresh high-quality livery re-vamp which clearly declared that this was a completely new chapter in Cookson 50 history.
And a pretty good chapter it was too. Lee Overlay Partners was the overall winner of the inaugural RORC Caribbean 600. And it was the first of several good stagings of the annual race as far as Ireland is concerned, for since then there have been top placings and class wins,
notably by Conor Fogerty with his Sunfast 3600 Bam! and the Howth Wright brothers-led team with the chartered Lombard 45 Pata Negra.
The RORC Caribbean 600 is a cat's cradle of a course - the start and finish is in the middle, at the south end of Antigua
As for the crew of Lee Overlay Partners, they'd acquired a taste for winter-rejecting offshore races, and in November 2013 they sailed in balmy Middle East weather in the 360-mile Dubai-Muscat Race, down the Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz to the Arabian Sea in what some naval authorities reckoned to be a war zone. If it was, Lee Overlay Partners spent a prudent minimum of time in it, as they broke the course record and notched another major overall win.
It was a warm, spice-laden Saturday night in Muscat when the win was declared. Meanwhile, back home in Dun Laoghaire on a wet and windy night of classic November qualities, the Royal St George YC was staging a gala celebration of all the 254 major international wins its members had recorded since the club's foundation in 1838, with the successful idea of cheering everyone up after emerging from the acute economic recession of 2008-2012. In the midst of it all, the news came in from Muscat. With appropriate acclamation, the number on the International Winnerboard was raised to 255.
