In last weekend's Sailing on Saturday (July 13th) we tried to interweave the story of offshore racing development with the long history of racing offshore along the 160 miles from Dublin Bay to Cork. It's an event which has been far from annual, or even biennial. But its intermittent stagings go all the way back to 1860, making it arguably the first recognisably modern offshore race.

Yet in doing so we failed to mention a significant staging of the race in August 1946, perhaps because it was hidden in plain sight. It was regularly observable somewhere on a wall in a framed photo, and is recounted at length in W M Nixon's To Sail The Crested Sea, which was published in 1979 to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the Irish Cruising Club.

MALACHY HYNES REMEMBERED

Fortunately Peter Ryan spotted the omission, and this glorious image of 1946 popped up on our screen here, living history from days almost beyond recall. It's an Irish Press photo of the era when newspapers had a tidy sideline in selling full-plate prints of their published photos, and we'd guess it is by Malachy Hynes, a polymath whose paying job was as a photographer to the long-gone Irish Press Group, with one of his particular enthusiasms being sailing images.

They're now of great historical value, but alas, it's feared all his negatives are long since lost. So if you have an inherited Irish Press sailing photo on the wall in the downstairs loo, then cherish it (the photo, that is).

Back in 1979, you could run acres of demanding-to-digest print without sub-titles, so here (with health warning for readers of short attention spans) is the story of the 1946 Dublin Bay to Cork Harbour Race as scanned in three parts from To Sail The Crested Sea. The book title was taken from a free-form re-interpretation and translation by James Clarence Mangan of an exultation from St Columba in 693AD, which most likely emerged when the saintly sailor has a fair wind, a safe offing from the coast, and a spot of sunshine:

"What joy to sail the crested sea,
And watch the waves
Beat white upon the Irish shore"

THE STORY FROM 1946

THE SCENE OF 1946

So why has all that apparently been forgotten? This special race when a crowd of sorts really did turn up to watch the start? Well, 1946 was a sort of post-war bounce time. There were very few new boats, such that offshore racing pioneer John Illingworth (who - as revealed above – had sold his pre-war mount Maid of Malham to Bridget Livingstone) was only able to get construction of his new all-conquering Myth of Malham underway with Hugh McLean on the Clyde by buying an ancient Int. 8 Metre, and telling officialdom the old boat was being repaired and restored and would be re-named Myth of Malham when the job was done.

In Ireland Skinner's of Baltimore had a couple of 16-ton ketches to John Kearney's design in build as a speculative venture for James Faulkner of Belfast Lough, but generally things were slow, and in Ireland in particular they got even slower, even if – as we shall see in Sailing on Saturday on July 27th – there was a burst of Olympic energy in 1948.

But in 1946, well-stored newer boats from the 1930s were soon made ready to go. And the story of the Dutch boat Groen Loew, built in wartime secrecy under a railway arch, is something which somebody will perhaps investigate further.

THE TWICE-BUILT BOAT

Then too the two Colonels are worth a mention – Blondie Hasler racing a 30 Square Metre with success offshore was something of a sensation on the immediate post-war scene, while Colonel Hollwey's handsome 14-ton ketch Viking O was known in her home port of Dun Laoghaire as "the twice-built boat'.

Her notably-determined owner had commissioned her in 1936 from highly-regarded Swedish builders, but when he sent his own surveyor unannounced the remote yard to see how things were getting on at a late stage of the building, not all was as it should have been. So the Colonel insisted they start completely anew, and for years a rejected and heavily-discounted semi-sister of Viking O sailed in Swedish waters, while the real one sailed in style from Dublin Bay.

As for Miss V Douglas, mentioned as being "Samson" aboard John Kearney's Mavis in the closing lines, she'd become John Kearney's crewmate and housekeeper after she and Daphne French joined Skipper Kearney in Dunmore East in September 1944 to help him get Mavis home to Dun Laoghaire. Thereafter, she kept him in such good shape that he was designing boats well into his eighties, and lived to 88. And until Mavis left Dun Laoghaire in 1952, Samson was more often at the helm than the skipper himself.

Mavis waiting for the Saturday afternoon sea breeze in Dun Laoghaire in 1950, with Skipper Kearney in the companionway and Miss Douglas – aka Samson – already at the helm. Photo: Dick Scott