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Displaying items by tag: DK46

#HYC - With all the recent offshore success for Howth Yacht Club sailors — not least Conor Fogerty in the OSTAR — you’d be forgiven for missing out on the impressive performance by Darren Wright, Kieran Jameson and company at the Giraglia Rolex Cup 2017, the Mediterranean's oldest offshore sailing event last week.

The HYC crew sailing on Hydra, a chartered DK46 designed by Wicklow-based Mark Mills, placed third overall in class ORC A in the inshore races at St Tropez — including a win in the third and final race from a tightly packed 80-boat start line last Tuesday 13 June.

Hydra was just out of the top third of finishers in the main offshore sprint to Genoa from Wednesday 14 to Saturday 17 June, placing 41st among the combined ORC A and B classes.

Combining the inshore races and offshore race, the Howth crew placed a very respectable fifth on 27 points from the 22-strong ORC A class — making for an emphatic tick on their offshore ‘bucket list’.

Published in Howth YC

#HYC - Kieran Jameson’s Howth Yacht Club team aim to tick another one off their offshore ‘bucket list’ this summer as they charter a keelboat for the Giraglia Rolex Cup.

The core group of Jameson, brothers Darren and Michael Wright, Johnny White, Colm Bermingham, navigator Rick DeNeve and Puppeteer regular Frank Dillon will be joined by offshore enthusiast Brian Turvey, Viking co-owner Mark Patterson and Dillon’s sailing partner Ronan Galligan, as well as young guns Sam O’Byrne and Shane Diviney for the Mediterranean’s oldest offshore race.

Usually in the water on their Corby 27 Kodachi, the core team will be taking over the Spanish-owned (but Wicklow designed) DK46 Maserati Hydra for the 65th Giraglia Rolex Cup from 9 June, which comprises three days of inshore races in St Tropez before the 450km offshore sprint to Genoa via the titular French island.

The challenge comes from the unpredictable winds along the route, particularly the Mistral — making this the Mediterranean equivalent of the similarly testing Rolex Fastnet Race.

The HYC website has more on the story HERE — and below you can watch a short film on last year’s Rolex Cup:

Published in Howth YC

The Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) Information

The creation of the Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) began in a very low key way in the autumn of 2002 with an exploratory meeting between Denis Kiely, Jim Donegan and Fintan Cairns in the Granville Hotel in Waterford, and the first conference was held in February 2003 in Kilkenny.

While numbers of cruiser-racers were large, their specific locations were widespread, but there was simply no denying the numerical strength and majority power of the Cork-Dublin axis. To get what was then a very novel concept up and running, this strength of numbers had to be acknowledged, and the first National Championship in 2003 reflected this, as it was staged in Howth.

ICRA was run by a dedicated group of volunteers each of whom brought their special talents to the organisation. Jim Donegan, the elder statesman, was so much more interested in the wellbeing of the new organisation than in personal advancement that he insisted on Fintan Cairns being the first Commodore, while the distinguished Cork sailor was more than content to be Vice Commodore.

ICRA National Championships

Initially, the highlight of the ICRA season was the National Championship, which is essentially self-limiting, as it is restricted to boats which have or would be eligible for an IRC Rating. Boats not actually rated but eligible were catered for by ICRA’s ace number-cruncher Denis Kiely, who took Ireland’s long-established native rating system ECHO to new heights, thereby providing for extra entries which brought fleet numbers at most annual national championships to comfortably above the hundred mark, particularly at the height of the boom years. 

ICRA Boat of the Year (Winners 2004-2019)