Galway Bay Sailing Club is emerging from the final constraints of the pandemic with a hyper-busy programme in line for 2022, and the added confidence – announced last week - of a Sports Capital Grant of €140,000. This will provide further support for a busy club which approaches each development opportunity with ingenuity and vision, combined with a fresh enthusiasm that belies the fact that GBSC recently celebrated its Golden Jubilee.
The members will be both hosting major happenings, and sending forth fleets of their own keelboats and dinghies for cruises-in-company or racing participation elsewhere. The vigour of western life around Galway city is reflected in the fact that in late May, Galway is the first stopover in the Round Britain & Ireland Race from Plymouth, with the special appeal of the initial Plymouth to Galway leg being such an attractive challenge that some crews will see it as a new stand-alone race in itself.
Then slightly later in the season, GBSC will be organizing one of its long-distance Cruises-in-Company. Pre-pandemic, the Club had a very successful fleet venture to Lorient in Brittany, but in 2022 they’re going to be heading the other way, north up the west coast of Ireland for a venture which has the working title of Galway to Galloway, as it will have a Scottish theme.
Thus the first fleet assembly – with numbers already being talked of as reaching thirty boats-plus – will be with the Royal Ulster YC at Bangor on Belfast Lough, as Scotland’s Galloway coast is nearby across the North Channel.
However, it hasn’t been forgotten that during the brief relaxation of restrictions in 2021, GBSC members organised their “Lambs Weekend” cruising-racing-in-company to the Aran Islands and Connemara in the early August Bank Holiday weekend, and it was one of the most successful events of the entire season in Ireland.
For those of us from the rest of Ireland, it would be more readily comprehended if they simply called it the Connemara Cruise, but you’d be wasting your time trying to wean Galway men off their own private joke. And anyway, on Valentine’s Day of all days, a rose is still a rose by any other name, so we can be sure that the GBSC Lamb’s Weekend/Connemara Cruise or whatever will find itself even more firmly established as a pillar event of the west coast programme in early August 2022, with fleet numbers pushing towards the 50 mark.