Although the more energetic clubs managed successful if very compressed programmes in the brief permitted sailing season of 2020, the pandemic shut-down was so all-encompassing for life in general that it’s taking quite some time to get a proper feeling that the programme for 2021 really has the potential to develop as the season makes on.
The fact that today we’re in the mild melancholy which comes on for the day or two after the Summer Solstice contributes to the mood, with some sailors peering muzzily out at the horizon like Rip van Winkle after his twenty years of sleep.
Garavogue in her heyday under her original rig in Dun Laoghaire Harbour sixty years ago.
But their challenge of adjustment is as nothing compared to those whose ideal vision of a sailing boat is the Dublin Bay 21. This 1902 Alfred Mylne-designed class last raced out of Dun Laoghaire in August 1986. So when the first three newly-restored boats re-appear at the National Yacht Club on Friday July 30th, we’ll be thinking in terms of the Sleeping Beauty and her century of zizz, rather than Rip van Winkle and his afternoon nap of twenty years.
Naneen pre-restoration in Kilrush with (left to right) Fionan de Barra, Steve Morris, design consultant Paul Spooner, and Hal Sisk
Admittedly it’s “only” 35 years since they last raced, but it sometimes does seem like a hundred, and many people had resigned themselves to the permanent disappearance of the class. It is only thanks to Fionan de Barra keeping the faith with the major solution-finding input of Hal Sisk - allied to the remarkable skills of boatbuilder Steve Morris of Kilrush – that we can now admire Naneen and Garavogue already sailing in the Shannon Estuary, while their sister-ship Estelle – originally built by Hollwey of Ringsend in 1903 for Herbert Wright, who in 1929 became founding Commodore of the Irish Cruising Club – will soon also be afloat.
For their final decades, the Twenty-Ones were almost completely focused on the National Yacht Club, so at the moment – for who can say if any proposed date is a fixture these days - the date of Friday July 30th 2021 has been set for the Twenty-one Foot Class’s sleeping beauties Naneen, Garavogue and Estelle to be re-awakened at the National Yacht Club. It will only a need a kiss from the most appropriate neighbourhood prince, but there’s no word yet as to whether auditions are planned for that special role……
Naneen - Dun Laghaire-built in 1905 - demonstrates her timeless elegance on her maiden sail in restored form
