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Displaying items by tag: Gary Crothers

The Ocean Cruising Club (OCC) has awarded Northern Ireland one-armed solo sailor Garry Crothers its 2020 Seamanship Award. 

Despite a pandemic raging throughout the year, the OCC found numerous achievements to recognise in the cruising world including the Derry sailor's summertime transatlantic voyage where his progress was regularly reported in Afloat.

Crothers found himself in St Martin when Covid-19 struck. He needed to get back to Northern Ireland for his daughter's wedding in September. With no flights and no possible crew, he sailed solo non-stop directly to Derry in Northern Ireland taking 37 days.

Crothers lost an arm in a motorcycle accident but has not let this limit his solo sailing.

Crothers is also involved in sailing for people with disabilities (Sailability) and the OCC citation says he is 'a true role model and inspiration'. 

Published in Cruising
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New York Yacht Club’s biennial Invitational Cup

Ireland has a proud history in New York Yacht Club’s biennial Invitational Cup, with Irish participation from the very start and a podium result in 2019.

In 2009, two Irish Clubs,  Royal St. George in Dun Laoghaire and Royal Cork in Crosshaven, entered into New York's newest sailing competition that was reminiscent of Newport’s America’s Cup days when 19 yacht club teams from 14 nations descended on this “City by the Sea”.

The Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup is a competition between yacht clubs, with strict eligibility rules ensuring that each team is comprised exclusively of amateur sailors.

The competition, which was first run in 2009, has drawn entries from 49 clubs from 22 nations on all six inhabited continents.

The New York Yacht Club won the inaugural event in 2009, with the Royal Canadian Yacht Club winning in 2011 and 2013, England's Royal Thames Yacht Club winning in 2015 and Southern Yacht Club from New Orleans winning in 2017.

In 2019 the regatta was sailed for the first time in the New York Yacht Club’s fleet of IC37 yachts, and Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, from Australia, became the first Southern Hemisphere club to win the trophy. And it was in this edition that Anthony O’Leary’s Royal Cork team took the bronze medal.