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A favourable window of glorious weather which started earlier in the week extended into the weekend and the final Sunday of the Dun Laoghaire Motor Yacht Club's Frostbite Series. The author of these reports was yet again unable to sail the event but acquired enough information to post this report when he went to pick up results for this column.

Blue skies and a slight haze on the horizon were more symptomatic on a Sunday in June/July before a sea-breeze kicks in than the second last Sunday of March when we all lost an hour in bed due to the clocks going forward. Still nobody could possibly have begrudged the loss of an hour in bed in lieu of the day that evolved. Crowds thronged the piers of Dun Laoghaire as everyone took advantage of the sunshine and the daylight addition to the evening. The ice-cream vendors were in danger of running out of stock such were the crowds.

The Fireball fleet responded to the weather and the close of the series, one assumes, by mustering 17 boats for the day. Two races were sailed outside the harbour in what I believe were near perfect conditions....apart from an adverse tide that necessitated a slightly conservative approach to the start.

Race 1 was started under a General Recall while Race 2 prompted three black flags when people who should know better failed to restart when they were adjudged over the line. A healthy South-Easterly of 15knots (or thereabouts) gave the fleet just about perfect conditions and with the added bonus of being outside the harbour is sea-swells it must have seemed as if summer had come early. Indeed, Valerie Kinnear, part of the committee boat team told me that it was quite lumpy outside.

I can't give you a blow by blow account but I can tell you that one of our most intense, but friendly rivalries, (intense on the water, friendly off it) in the fleet ended as "honours-even" over the day's two races. Mick Creighton & Frank Cassidy are great mates who enjoy nothing more than baiting each other on the water and then adjourning to a nearby watering hole to conduct a post-mortem on proceedings. Yesterday, Mick was crewed by Ciaran Hickey, no shrinking violet himself, while Frank would have had his long-standing crew John Hudson on board. All four have contributed to the camaraderie of the Irish Fireball fleet and have provided the rest of us with lots of entertainment along the way.

At the "business end" of the day's proceedings, the race wins were shared between Neil Spain & Hugh Butler (14807) and Owen Laverty & Ed Butler (14990). Behind them, the runaway leaders in the series, Messrs Butler & Oram and Rumball & Moran scored two 3rds and two 2nds respectively, probably more content to watch each other than worry too much about race wins. Andy Boyle & Barry Hurley also had a consistent day with 2 x 4ths, while the 5th places went to Laverty/Butler in Race 1 and Louis Smyth & Joe O'Reilly in Race 2.

The days' mugs went to Dave Coleman and Glen Fisher in Race 1 and Cearbhaill Daly & crew in the second!

The day's events concluded not only the second series but the Frostbite season, though in truth, the weather over the period has been exceptionally good. We didn't lose any races to severe cold weather as we have done in recent years and any races lost to strong (or once, no wind) were recovered by having two races on the subsequent Sunday.

Reporting consistently on a set of races such as this can't be done single-handedly and I would like to thank, in this concluding report, Louis Smyth, Neil Colin, Noel Butler, Kenny Rumball, Hugh Butler and Mick Creighton for providing me with information for the column.

Thanks must also go to Olivier Proveur and his team for providing the racing over the winter. The Frostbites may be a staple of the Irish Fireball scene but it still needs volunteers to run it every Sunday – Cormac Bradley