The approach of the final Dublin Bay Sailing Club "routine Saturday" race this weekend (Saturday 28th September) is a reminder that, in their heyday from 1947 to 2000, the best way to see and experience the classic Dublin Bay 24s in action was during an ordinary late season Saturday afternoon race staged by Dublin Bay Sailing Club.
Their evening racing on Thursdays was inevitably time and daylight curtailed. And if it happened to be a regatta weekend, the regatta itself dominated the experience. On top of that, around the height of the summer, the Dublin Bay 24s might have taken off en masse for Clyde Week, or even in its earlier incarnation as Clyde Fortnight, in which the yachting magnates of Glasgow were determined to show that when they took time off to go sailing, they weren't going to mess about with just a piffling week of it.
The Dublin Bay 24s gathered at the Royal Irish YC pontoon to celebrate their Golden Jubilee in 1997. Photo: W M Nixon
LONG CRUISES
Beyond that again, several owners – most notably Ninian Falkiner and Rory O'Hanlon – regularly went off on long cruises with their DB24s Euphanzel and Harmony, while Stephen O'Meara's Fenestra was campaigned in offshore races by Arthur Odbert, and was overall winner of the 1963 RORC Irish Sea Race.
Thus "normal" DBSC Saturday racing for the DB24s were almost abnormal. Yet that was when you experienced the purest essence of the class. It wonderfully close racing in remarkably good looking boats well capable of going offshore, but raced on those special Saturdays by people who were within easy reach of home when the day's sport was concluded.
HARD SAILING
It was only when the many years of hard sailing were taking their toll on boats and crew that the final curtain came down on this very special chapter of sailing in Ireland on Saturday September 25th 2004. Obviously the "tired and worn" boats were well capable of a classic re-build, even if it would be expensive. But it is only now, twenty years after the last race, that we are seeing more than one re-built Dublin Bay 24 sailing again.
"They were hard sailed" – the Martin brothers' DB24 Adastra taking a squall in her stride as she emerges from Dun Laoghaire Harbour
The re-born Periwinkle – restored in Brittany – has been a lone adornment of Dublin Bay for some time now. And the word is that out in Brittany, Arandora's restoration is no longer stalled. But another restoration-rebuild – that of Zephyra with The Apprenticeshop in Maine, long after she'd been found by a dog-walker out the back of a castle in Mayo – was not a matter of urgency.
MYLNE DESIGN
The elegant 37.7ft DB24 hull designed by Alfred Mylne proved to be of such a useful size for boat-building craftsmanship instruction that they managed to make the project last for five years in all. It seems that although commercial boat-builders see the best and quickest use of time as being of the essence, for boat-building schools with a significant psycho-social element, time is stretched to the limit in order to extract the maximum instructional and wellness benefit from each specialized and rewarding task.
The restored DB 24 Periwinkle racing in the 2017 Dun Laoghaire Bicentenary Regatta. Photo: W M Nixon
LIMIT TO PROJECT-MAXIMISATION
Nevertheless there's a limit to such project-optimisation, and the finished boat – superbly finished at that – had finally to be launched in the summer of 2024. But then sailing her seems to have been under a different heading completely. And being absorbed by the frantic rush of regattas through our own summer, such as it was, our attention has been elsewhere. But with the final DBSC Saturday coming down the line, attention returned to Maine.
And we found that Zephyra had made a public appearance under sail at the celebrated Eggemoggin Reach Regatta. The resulting photo – revealing the utter mastery of Alfred Mylne in drawing a less-is-more sheerline of perfection – really does make you wonder how on earth the mega-rich yotties of South Dublin allowed such boats to be taken away from their shores. That is, until you realise that the surest way to become a rich yotty is to become a mega-rich yotty, and then personally under-write the restoration of a Dublin Bay 24.
EGGEMOGGIN REACH REGATTA 2024 RESULTS
Eggemoggin 2024 results. Also downloadable below as a pdf file
Coming out of the trance induced by that header photo, we found the Eggemoggin Regatta Results intriguing. And we also discovered that Zephyra – the name she was given in 1947 by first owner Lindsay Crabbe, who was to be Royal Irish YC Commodore from 1957 to 1968 – now seems to have become Zephra, but that may be a misprint.
However, there's no misprinting the star performance of the winner, noted Maine-based furniture craftsman Geoffrey Warner with his Robert Henry-designed 31ft Willow, an attractive German-built wooden wonder of the International 500 class.
Despite her relatively small size, Willow went round the Eggemoggin course in less than two hours - just 1:56:55 – making her the only boat to do so. And with the second lowest rating, she won overall by more than ten minutes in a very impressive performance, even if Zephyra's crew were on a learning curve. That said, were there a Concours d'Elegance award at Eggemoggin, we know which way we'd be voting.
