Most sailors would have seen themselves as Friday Fun-Folk and Monday Moaners until yesterday (Thursday) evening, when Howth Yacht Club Commodore Neil Murphy announced that the club's big one for 2023, the staging of the ICRA Nationals from September 8th to 10th, would be sponsored by the major international tech-force monday.com with its main Irish face, Providence.
It would almost be easier to list the very few services that this state-of-the-art international business development group doesn't provide. But for sailors it's sufficient to say that if you have problems in keeping tabs on your essential racing crew panel, then monday.com will have a system which makes it all much more straightforward and efficient. And as any experienced and successful owner will attest, if you've a system that monitors a race-winning crew panel in an easy and accessible way, then its transference in different forms to business development at any size and level can be taken as a given, as monday.com can give a lot.
But then, so too can ICRA, as their lead representative Richard Colwell of the successful J/109 Outrajeous reminded us. The hard-fought ICRA Nats may be when they go most public, but their season-long monitoring of many events to adjudicate the ICRA Boat of the Year (the current one is the Evans brothers of Howth's J/99 Snapshot) is one of the key analytics of Irish sailing, while their U25 programme has become an international pace-setter.
The championship organisation is being chaired by Jill Sommervile, and though September may now seem a long way distant, she made it very clear that early entrants will get a generous discount, providing a saving which can be usefully re-used when party time comes in September, and Monday is everyone's favourite day of the week.