Between the eclectic fleet racing in the 50th Anniversary Howth Frostbites 2024-25 and the 28 cruiser-racers that turned out last Sunday to race in the annual time-honoured winter-long Brass Monkey series, the total weekend fleet that enjoyed the unusually favourable weather off the Fingal coast was nudging towards the 60 mark.
But while the Dinghy Frostbites came up with a slather of detailed results, the outcome of the Brass Monkeys makes the Third Secret of Fatima into a tabloid headline by comparison. The Brass Monkeys have their own way of doing things, while they seem to communicate with each other through telepathy.
BRASS MONKEY SECRETS REVEALED
Yet it's simply enough explained. They're not always a hundred per cent sure who'll be there on the day, and so they wait for two races to be completed to see how boats and crews are performing before they start issuing handicaps and results, all of which will start to happen this Sunday (November 17th), should the weather Gods remain benevolent.
Pre-start manoeuvres for Mary Ellen (left, Kevin O'Byrne) and Paul Harrison's Helm's Deep. Photo: BMT
By some reckoning, they're actually sailing the 40th Anniversary Brass Monkey Series. Be that as it may, for years now the series has been quietly organized by Pat Connolly, the Optician to the Stars, who regularly raced the early series in a Holman-designed Twister 28 (best boat I ever had, he says), and then in a sporty Sun Fast 32. But in recent years, while he still cruises his Sun Odyssey 32, his racing energies are devoted to being The Keeper of the Flame to maintain the purity of the seemingly relaxed yet secretly sacred Brass Monkeys ethos.
"A LOUCHE CROWD"
Not that purity would always be the first word that would spring to mind in relation to all Brass Monkey crews over the years. Back in the day, I found myself doing the series with decidedly mixed crew – louche, you might almost say - in a Westerly Conway 36 ketch that was so overladen with up-mast Radomes and whatever that, when we were hit by southerly 44-knot dense air gust while trying to get to the finish line in Howth Sound, all forward progress ceased. The twin-keeled boat went sideways at about 1.5 knots, leaving a wake to weather that would have provided white-water rafting, should we have sought it.
Clean start on Sunday for the First 40.7 Tiger (Stephen Harris), the Sigma 33 Leeuwin (E Burke & J Murray) and the Sun Odyssey 37 Arcturus. Photo: BMT
But the squall passed, we finished, and by the time we got into Howth Marina the boat's catering manager Jimmy Markey – now the only ICC member to have ever seen his son, in this case Alan Markey, installed as an ICC Commodore – was able to announce that the first course of hot cocktail sausages was precisely ready the moment we got the warps secured in the marina.
With such a boat, the light airs were as tricky as the heavy stuff. But when we asked Pat Connolly if it was okay if we livened up the spinnaker-less ketch's offwind performance by using the spinnaker off my Contessa 35, despite said Contessa having the foretriangle of many a 45-footer, he didn't demur as he could adjust the figures.
LAST RACE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
And so the memory of our last race, as Christmas closed in, was of rounding the weather mark off Malahide in light airs with Charlie Haughey on the wheel, much amused by the foredeck gymnastics ICC's most distinguished Honorary Secretary Brian Hegarty and your scribe as we tried to get that enormous acreage of oversize spinnaker aloft without it touching the water, which would easily have become a disastrous scenario with boat and keel and rudder and propeller wrapped in spinnaker cloth.
The secret life of Kyran O'Grady. If you've ever wondered what Round Ireland Race organiser Kyran O'Grady of Wicklow SC does in the winter, when the opportunities for his calling as a mast-thatcher are limited, the answer is that he is racing his classic 1971 Swan 37 Bandersnatch in the Brass Monkeys at Howth every Sunday morning. Photo: BMT
THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE TO LUNCH
Happily we managed, our cluttered and grossly over-spinnakered ketch ran down the long run to the finish with swift success even as we were being given an early tasting of Jimmy Markey's deliciously aromatic sausages, as there would be very little marina-lingering lunch party that day. For the last race of the pre-Christmas part of the Brass Monkeys series was followed by the boisterous Prize-Giving Lunch in the clubhouse, with 329 people stretching Howth YC's hospitality offering to the limit. And all of it mercifully only a couple of days before the days started getting longer again.
It is April 1971, and the newly-arrived Swan 37 Bandersnatch (Ross & Peter Courtney) is having her debut party among the fishing boats in Howth Harbour, with Ross Courtney and Hilary Fannin, young daughter of crewman Bob Fannin, clarifying a debating point. Photo: W M Nixon
