#britirc – The lineup for the British IRC Nationals at Cowes from tomorrow to Sunday July 19th has increased in the final countdown in recent days. However, with only one of them joining IRC1, defending champion Anthony O'Leary sees no significant new threats to his title from the Class 1's 14 boats. But then, as he added in the classic dry O'Leary style, they already had more than enough to be going along with regardless of late extra entries writes W M Nixon. (Download full entry list below as a pdf file).

We heard from Skipper O'Leary, the current Afloat.ie Sailor of the Year, as he was winding down to leave his office in Cork on Wednesday evening, something which underlines the fact that virtually all the Antix campaigns – with whatever boat – have always been and still are quintessentially Corinthian enterprises.

So here was the Corkman heading off to the heartlands of British professional sailing, and he's only going to arrive there the day before the championship starts. Is that cool or what? And as for his crew, they're all rated as amateurs – "every one from one to ten" – as his son, occasional crewmember and Olympic sailor Peter O'Leary, is staying home in Cork in anticipation of making his father a grandfather maybe even while the championship is under way.

But the O'Leary approach to campaigning is not quite as offhand as it sounds. There are few sailors who know more of racing the Solent and adjacent waters. And as for the boat and crew and skipper, they're now joined at the hip, after a steep learning curve from the previous Antix, the earlier Ker 40 of 2006 vintage with which O'Leary led Ireland's successful Commodore's Cup campaign almost exactly a year ago.

Yet although his current Munster red Ker 40 Antix was the hot new boat in January 2014 when she set the results alight in Florida under Marc Gimrich's ownership, things have moved on rapidly since then, and the latest Ker 40, Sir Keith Mills' already hyper-successful Invictus, represents a quantum leap in performance potential.

Also making things more challenging is Piet Vroon's new Ker 51 - yet another Tonnere - while South African Mike Bartholomew, a highly-rated Solent performer with his Mark Mills-designed King 40 Tokoloshe, has moved up a step to the GP 42 Tokoloshe II.

There's Irish interest in other classes too, with RORC Commodore Michael Boyd of Dun Laoghaire returning to the fray in Class 2 with the Grand Soleil 43 Quokka with which – in partnership with Niall Dowling – he contributed a steady performance to make a major contribution to Ireland's 2014 Commodore's Cup win. For this year's racing, he's campaigning in tandem with Quokka's owner Peter Rutter, with the 90th Anniversary Fastnet Race on August 16th a central part of their programme.

Among the 17 boats in Class 3, IRL 725 is the J/35 Bengal Magic. She still carries her sail number from hugely successful days racing out of Befast Lough, but for some time now she has been based in southwest England, yet is still very much a force to be reckoned with under the command of James Chalmers.

Lowest-rated of all in Class 3 is the 1939-vintage Whooper, for a while the Queen of Skerries, Co Dublin while owned by Christy and Joe Fox. The veteran Laurent Giles centre-boarder is currently on a roll as she was overall winner – for the second time – of the Round the Island race three weeks ago to bring further success to owner Giovanni Belgrano. He is one of many international marine industry professionals based around the Solent, but he races Whooper strictly for fun, and he's having a lot of that at the moment.

So with professionals racing for fun, and amateurs like Anthony O'Leary racing to professional level and beyond, the British IRC Nationals 2015 seem to have a bit of everything. Further to complicate the mix, the event raises the perfectly reasonable query as to why they claim to be the Nationals when they've people with names like Vroon and O'Leary and Belgrano very much involved - surely it would more properly be titled the British Opens?

But as for our Sailor of the Year's defence campaign being talked of as a David and Goliath situation, just remember who won that particular contest....