Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

#fireball – A second Sunday in succession of the Frostbite Series was lost to high winds yesterday when an adverse forecast and blustery conditions made racing a victim of the weather. Having enjoyed Sunday racing every weekend since the end of October, it is unusual to have lost two Sundays in a row. It is also very unusual to have such a sustained period of heavy winds, and the suggestion is that they will be around for another few days at least. While there is bright sunshine in Dublin Bay this morning, the sea is covered in white horses with a stiff breeze coming out of the West. The Dun Laoghaire Harbour website is recording a steady 17 knots with gusts in excess of 30 knots.

So maybe the time has come to detail what the Irish Fireball Class has planned for the summer season of 2013.

With Easter early, the regatta season will be preceded by what is becoming the traditional opener for our season – a weekend training session by Adam Bowers, RYA Coach, World Champion sailor, excellent teacher and raconteur. This year the training weekend will be hosted by the Royal St. George Yacht Club over the weekend of 20/21 April. Adam has a preference for working with multiple boats in a fleet scenario and rounds off the teaching side of things with a 3-race regatta, back to back racing with no discard. The idea is to hone the skills that have been the subject of the weekend.

By early May the season should be well underway with DBSC racing on Tuesday nights. Our first away event will be the Open Championship, which will be hosted by Killaloe sailing Club. In a departure from the normal format this will be a one-day event with three races with the added incentive of sailing Killaloe's Spring Challenge on the Sunday. The Spring Challenge is a distance race sailed on handicap (if my recall is correct). A past winner of this event from outside the Killaloe community but a member of the Fireball fraternity is Mike Murphy from Waterford.

In June we travel northwards to Carlingford Lough and the host club of Carlingford Lough Yacht Club on the northern shore. The Fireball fleet has a long tradition of going to these waters – I still remember Adrian and Maeve Bell sailing the Fireball there (and their Enterprise before that) on these waters and our last visit was in 2008, which coincided with the club's 50th Anniversary. We also enjoy excellent hospitality here and with it being a "skip" across the border we are confident that we will get good numbers travelling over the weekend of 15/16 June.

July will be a busy moth with the Class supporting the 4-day Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta, hosted by the four Dun Laoghaire clubs every alternate year. Fireballs have been extended an invitation for all of the preceding editions of this event which had its inception in 2005. It will host boats from Class 0 all the way down, in size, to the Water Wags, a local design that has cult status here in Dun Laoghaire. The Dinghy fraternity will have their own dedicated course in Dublin Bay for the four-day, ten race event.

A ten-race series will allow the fleet to tune up for the Nationals which will be hosted in Skerries on the weekend immediately following the Volvo event. Skerries has been a stronghold of Fireball sailing over a long period of time and in 2000 hosted the Fireball Europeans.

At the end of July, the UK Fireball Nationals may prove to be an attraction for the Irish Fireball fleet. Due to be hosted in Looe, in Cornwall, over the end of July/start of August, the venue hosted the 2012 GP14 Worlds over a very breezy week.

A break of almost a month between domestic events precedes the Fireball Leinsters which will be hosted by the DMYC on August 17/18. Then it is off to sunny Slovenia for a two-week sojourn and the Fireball Worlds, before returning to autumnal Ireland and the season closing Fireball Munsters to be hosted by Lough Ree Yacht Club outside Athlone, over the last weekend of September. We haven't been to Lough Ree for a few years but we had a day blown out after one race the last time we were there. Great sailing waters with only a short distance to sail to get to the racing area!

While it might be argued that the Fireball fixture list is very concentrated on the East Coast, with only two inland venues on the roster, the reality is that we are a) trying to concentrate on clubs which already have Fireballs in residence and b) trying to cut down on travelling in order to keep the costs down. In recent years the Nationals, in particular, have gone west and south, but there isn't quite the same appetite for the more distant locales and by keeping the events closer to home we can cut down on travel costs, accommodation costs and time away from work. Carlingford Lough can be accessed by an early morning start on the Saturday and Killaloe and Lough Ree offer a similar advantage in terms of departure times.