This coming Saturday (April 12th) evening's celebrations in Crosshaven, honouring a hundred years of the Fastnet Race and the Royal Ocean Racing Club with a dinner in the Royal Cork Yacht Club, will naturally highlight the great boats and crews from Ireland who made an impact on the international scene around the Fastnet Race down the ages.

There will deservedly be much mention of Harry Donegan and his 1897-vintage 17-ton gaff cutter Gull from Cork. One of the seven boats in the original race, she and her doughty little skipper and crew with their "sky-scraper" jackyard topsail – a real monster of cloth and spars at sea - placed third overall.

Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about Gull is that she was the only true yacht in the original fleet of seven. All the rest were either based directly on proven seagoing sailing workboats, or had actually been sailing workboats in occupations where seagoing speed capability was essential. The outstanding one was RORC founding Commodore George Martin's overall winner Jolie Brise, a 1913-vintage Le Havre pilot cutter that is still going strong.

The Presence. Few boats exude the sheer star quality of Jolie Brise. Photo: W M Nixon

But as the RORC programme developed down the years, while the main centres of activity such as the English Channel and the Thames Estuary soon saw an efficient and able RORC boat type emerging, back in Ireland and the Irish Sea the offshore fleets had a certain eccentricity, and there were few if any state-of-the-art boats.

The Donegans – father and son – continued with the heavily gaff rigged Gull until 1946, when Young Harry replaced her with the likewise gaffed Clyde 50 Sybil of Cumae. Meanwhile, Billy Mooney of Howth, Harry Donegan's partner in setting in train the movement that was to lead to the establishment of the Irish Cruising Club at a rally in Glengarriff in 1929, had the classic 9-ton Albert Strange gaff yawl Nirvana of Arklow built for him by Jack Tyrrell in Arklow in 1925, the same year in which John Kearney launched the new 37ft gaff yawl Mavis to his own design in Ringsend in Dublin Port.

All these boats were raced offshore – and successfully - against fleets which saw Bermuda rigged-numbers steadily on the increase. Yet in the 1947 Fastnet Race, Billy Mooney with his comfortable centre-cockpit Tyrrell-built gaff ketch Aideen of 1934 vintage won his class.

Billy Mooney's new 16-ton gaff ketch Aideen does Committee Boat duty at Howth Regatta 1935. In 1947 she won her class in the Fastnet Race. Photo: HYC

Soon afterwards, however, Douglas Heard of Royal St George YC commissioned the design for a seagoing "Flying Thirty" from Uffa Fox to be built multi-skin by Tyrrells. With this one mighty leap in Huff of Arklow, the offshore fleets of Ireland and the Irish Sea began to look a bit more modern, an effect heightened by the Flying 35 Flying Fox built by Uffa Fox for Freddy Brownlee of the National YC.

GLEN CLASS BUILDER'S CLARK RACER

Arthur Clapham, the semi-production builder of the new Mylne-designed Glen OD in Bangor, had the resources to build the modern Robert Clark-designed 11-ton Uladh, but he kept her for only a year or so and she was last reported in Croatia. And the tireless John Sisk built a modern Robert Clark-designed cruiser-racer Cheerful Maid in 1949. But he sailed to relax, not to race, and the banner of Irish offshore sailing was flown in the English Channel by Dale Harris, who went down from Belfast Lough with the vintage gaff cutter Anolis.

John Sisk's Robert Clark-designed Dun Laoghaire-built 1950 sloop Cheerful Maid makes full use of high water in Bulloch Harbour for her debut. A near-sister, Uladh, was built by Arthur Clapham in the Glen Boatyard in Bangor. Photo: Sisk Family

By the mid-50s, the Irish presence in the main RORC scene was being maintained by Frank & Eric Hopkirk of Royal Ulster YC, older brothers of successful international rally driver Paddy Hopkirk. While their 17-ton cutter Glance was at least Bermuda-rigged, she was nevertheless of 1894-vintage. Yet they collected a class prize in one of their Fastnet Races, and had a high time of it when the RORC programme brought them to Spain, where they got a bit over-involved in one of the local festivals which involved a Running of the Bulls. Fortunately, no injuries were terminal.

The Hopkirk brothers 1894-vintage Glance (RUYC) at the start of the 1953 Fastnet Race, in which she obtained a class place. Photo: RUYC

THE FASTNETEERS DINNER OF 1972 IS NOW ALMOST MYTHOLOGICAL

By the 1960s, with Denis Doyle setting the pace, Irish involvement in the RORC programme and the Fastnet Race began to look a bit more like a contemporary branch of the sport. And our numbers were increasing such that after the 1971 Fastnet Race, veterans Bob Fannin and Reggie Walsh, with Rory O'Hanlon as their figure-head for respectability, put together a Fastneteers Dinner for everyone who had ever done a Fastnet Race on an Irish boat. The result in March 1972 in the Royal St George YC was on such a scale and at such a pace that anyone who claims to remember it anyway well quite clearly wasn't there at all.

Denis Doyle of Cork did several of his early RORC races with the 30 Sq. Metre Vanja IV before the rules were tightened up at the end of the 1963 season to include more safety features

SUDDENLY, A CENTENARY

Now, just like that, we're facing a Centenary Dinner in the hugely appropriate setting of the Royal Cork. And we may find that Ireland and the Irish Sea's reputation for producing slightly unexpected winners of RORC races still holds up.

After all, back in 1964, the overall winner of the RORC Beaumaris Cork race was John McConnell of the National Yacht Club with the hefty 1936 vintage Norman Dallimore-designed cutter Susannah. She had previously found an element of fame as the flagship of the Dungarvan fleet, cruised extensively as far south as Spain by owner-skipper Reville Farrell with a crew that included a young Gerry Walsh, subsequently the father of Dungarvan multi-voyagers Donal Walsh and Maire Breathnach.

The restored Susana sailing. In 1964, when owned and skippered by John McConnell (NYC), she was overall winner of the RORC Beaumaris-Cork Race

It is Maire and her husband Andrew Wilkes who have come up with these photos of the restored Susannah, the job having been done by their serial boat restorer friends Dick Couture of the Channel Islands. They show Susannah to be a rather more slippy-looking boat than the photos of her winning the 1964 RORC race might suggest, but nevertheless RORC success was probably the last thing on anyone's mind when Susanna was created.

When Susanna was winning RORC races, she was fully equipped with guard rails. Now, as a restored classic, she is fully equipped with a guard dog. Photo: Dick Couteur

FULL GALE IN IRISH SEA

Yet the year before, the RORC Irish Sea race of 1963 in a gale of wind had produced another unexpected winner, the fast-but-wet Dublin Bay 24 Fenestra, skippered for owner Stephen O'Mara by the redoubtable Arthur Odbert. He and his shipmates had spent all their money beforehand at the huge pre-race party, so they reckoned there was no point in seeking shelter as other boats were doing along the 220-mile course. They kept slugging on until they finished in Dun Laoghaire where – as they'd won overall – they still had no need for money, as everyone welcoming them back wanted to provide a party.

The Dublin Bay 24 Harmony in Rory O'Hanlon's ownership. They would not have been anyone's first bet to win an RORC Irish Sea race in a Force 9, but Fenestra did that very thing in 1963.

McGRUER TRIUMPHANT

With Susanna's race of 1964, a routine was established for a few years whereby an RORC race in the Irish Sea in even years would alternate with the Fastnet, and 1966's RORC Irish Sea Race was from the Royal Anglesey YC in Beaumaris to what was then the Royal Munster YC in Crosshaven in its final years before amalgamation with the Royal Cork for the Quarter Millennium in 1970.

In very summery weather, much was expected of Denis Doyle's new 47ft Robert Clark-designed Moonduster, and Tom Chadwick's new Illingworth & Primrose-designed Green Highlander with Angus Primrose among those on the strength, but in the end it was the sheer tactical genius of Brian Hegarty of Howth that won the day.

He was racing on Johnny Pearson's James McGruer-designed 8 Metre Cruiser/Racer Orana, a boat which, in her five years of hard-raced existence, had never been treated to any new sails. Be that as it may, "The Heg" reckoned the pre-race overnight calm in mid-channel would be repeated, so he went hell-for-leather for the Wexford coast while they had breeze – followed by Ross Courtney's Cruiser 8 Fionnuala – and by going right inside all the Wexford banks in the dark, Orana stayed in the night breeze off the land which, with the new ebb, carried her round the Tuskar and on past the Coningbeg into the breeze of open ocean without another boat in sight, for the cream of the fleet were still becalmed and kedged (using every rope in the boats) well northeast of the Tuskar.

Johnny Pearson's 8 Metre Cruiser-Racer Orana gliding to line honours and the overall win masterminded by Brian Hegarty in the 1966 ROC Beaumaris-Cork race. Photo: Cork Examiner

Orana finished on the Monday morning all on her own with Fionnuala an hour or so astern, producing the previously unthinkable result of line honours and first and second overall in an RORC Race for two 8 Metre Cruiser/Racers, a boat type savagely handicapped under the RORC rule.

PETER BRETT'S CONTRIBUTION

Yet the non-conformist Fenestra, Susanna and Orana successes in RORC racing had been well anticipated by Liverpool sailor Peter Brett. He worked as an industrial chemist in one of those dark Satanic multi-piped chemical production plants that loomed over Merseyside, but lived in almost rural peace along the Dee Estuary on the west side of the Wirral Pennsula.

Off his house in the sands of Dee was a pool which he reckoned would enable him to keep a moored cruiser of 4' 9" draft, so he self-designed a 30ft 9ins transom-sterned sloop of 25ft LWL and 9ft beam on 4' 9" draft with no troublesome centreplate, and had her built in 1951 by Allanson & Son of Freckleton in Lancashire. He named her Fair Rover, taking the name from that very evocative little poem by Robert Bridges which has also provided the Boylan literary dynasty with their "White Sails Crowding" title for their continuing history of the Royal Irish Yacht Club.

Wolf in sheep's clothing. The Dee 25 Salamandra was built for Dr Alan Stead (Royal Dee YC), who later was a leading founder member of the Irish Sea Offshore Racing Association. Her sister-ship Rondinella was overall winner of the RORC Cowes-Dinard Race in 1959.

Poor old Bridges must have been exhausted by the time he'd given birth to it, as he could think of no better title than "The Passer-By".  That is surely pedestrian in every sense, but whatever, it meant Peter Brett's attractive Fair Rover had the name to herself, and she lived up to it so well that other Liverpool sailors wanted sister-ships, and thus the Dee 25 class was born to a life of success.

THE STORMY RORC CHANNEL RACE OF 1956

The best-known of them from racing success was Mike & Molly Tomlinson's Rondinella, which went south in 1956 for some RORC English Channel races, and was the only Class III boat to finish in the ultra-stormy Channel Race. This was to figure prominently in Adlard Coles' seminal book Heavy Weather Sailing, but Mike just brushed off the compliments by saying that as a working dentist he had a list of appointments in his Liverpool surgery on Monday morning, and simply had to be there.

Then in 1959 Rondinella went south again, and this time was overall winner in the big fleet RORC Cowes Dinard Race. It made for a inspiring last hurrah, as the Tomlinsons had the Dee 27 Pellegrina on the way, and then in due course Peter Brett went on to become a full-time designer-builder with the Rival range.

All his designs had their own special something, but with the first of them, Fair Rover 75 years ago, it was a quiet star quality. There's something about shoal draft being made to work to windward without the hassle of a centreboard that appeals to the simple sailor in any of us.

More recently, it came in the 1965 Fastnet Race with Dick Carter winning overall with his own-designed Rabbit, one of the greatest little boats that has ever sailed, and a worthy topic of conversation for Saturday night in Crosshaven. As too is Rondinella, a sweet surprise that came out of the Irish Sea.

The little Wunderboot. Dick Carter's moderate-draft Rabbit keeps her wind clear in the early stages of the 1965 Fastnet Race, which she won overall

AND THEN THERE WAS IMP

All this was a long time ago, when the world was young and innocent. Since then, there have been fireworks, none more so than 1977 when Skip Allen brought the Ron Holland-designed Imp out of the Pacific to take the overall Fastnet win of 1977, and showed it was no flash in the pan even when 1979's Fastnet storm struck, as she won Class I to keep up the pace.

She's now a longtime Cork Harbour star with the George Radleys, and is very much part of what has to be celebrated on Saturday night down Crosshaven way.

The One and Only. Imp in the 1987 Fastnet in the ownership of Roy Dickson (HYC), when she won the Philip Whitehead Cup.