Film footage of the 1970 Fireball World Championship hosted in Fenit by Tralee Bay Sailing Club has been digitised after more than 50 years and has been shared online by John Caig, who won the event with Jack Davies.
According to Caig, the original 16mm film had deteriorated over the decades but a BBC engineer was able to transfer the footage to digital at a higher resolution than existing colour video of the event.
Barry O’Neill of the Royal St George Yacht Club provided Afloat.ie with more details about the film, which was made on “zero budget” by O’Neill and colleagues from the former Arks advertising agency.
Members of the Celtic rock band Horslips also worked at the agency at the time, and O’Neill says he roped them in to compose music for the film, which may mark “one of the first times Horslips had been in a recording studio”.
