With the RORC’s new Griffin Project for training young sailors recently launched in a blaze of publicity, there have been the usual demands that something similar should be delivered for Ireland. But Sailing on Saturday would suggest that, over the years, the Irish offshore sailing and cruiser-racing communities have done well in creating junior and trainee pathways which function within the relatively scattered nature of our offshore racing centres.
For people from Ireland’s most remote sailing areas, it may seem that there is already an excessive focus of offshore racing attention on the Cork-Kinsale and Greater Dublin powerhouses. But these two big centres are physically very separate – they’re 120 awkward-to-sail sea miles apart. They seldom function in a co-ordinated way. And our second tier regions, such as (1) West Cork on the Baltimore/Schull link, (2) the Shannon Estuary including Tralee Bay, (3) all of Galway Bay with Clew Bay, and (4) Sligo with Mullaghmore and increasingly Killybegs, they all have their own local pride and claim to a place in the offshore and cruiser-racing sun.
GLOBAL RORC?
The RORC may be promoting itself globally with the second RORC Baltic Race in Finnish waters this summer, which brings the bonus of strengthening the Club’s own IRC measurement system in an area where the rival ORC has been on manoeuvres in recent years. Another battle line was the Sydney-Hobart Race, where the organisers have re-affirmed they’re holding firm to IRC. But the reality is that much of the Club’s active people power and boat numbers are to be found in a narrow segment of the English Channel, maybe best called the Hot Spot.
OFFSHORE RACING’S INTERNATIONAL HOT SPOT
The Hot Spot is an area bounded to the north by the Solent, and to the south by the coast of northeast Brittany going on into the Cotentin Peninsula around Cherbourg. Fully expanded yet still very neat, the relevant coastal edges are Poole to Chichester on the English side, and Dinard/St Malo to Le Havre on the French coast.
The Hot Spot. The international concentration of sailors, boats and major competitions in this single section of the English Channel (or La Manche if you prefer) is unrivalled. All of the popular RORC Cowes-St Malo Race takes place within it. As for the Fastnet Race, while it still may go round the same Irish rock, nevertheless it now starts at Cowes and finishes at Cherbourg
It is a reality most directly expressed in the colossally popular RORC Cowes-St Malo Race each July, yet it also emerges with Big Daddy, the biennial RORC Fastnet Race. This may scoop round our own Irish Fastnet Rock, but where originally it started heading eastward off Ryde IOW, and finished at Plymouth, it now starts in Cowes heading westward, and ends in Cherbourg heading east, ultimately because these arrangements best suit the greatest number of boats and crews.
The biggest Local Derby of them all – idyllic conditions for the RORC’s St Malo Race. Photo: Paul Wyeth/RORC
Consequently we find ourselves facing the Centenary of the Fastnet Race coming up in 2025 with our own Fastnet Rock itself the only remaining specific feature of the first race in 1925, which started eastward out of the Solent at Ryde, and finished at Plymouth in Devon
Ireland’s Fastnet Rock is the only surviving fixture of the course of the original Fastnet Race as its Centenary approaches in 2025
FOLLOWING THE NUMBERS
But as the Rick Morris research group on the best location for staging the ICRA Nationals concluded early in 2019, it makes sense to go where the numbers are already to be found. That can’t be done quite so simply in Ireland, yet in the Hot Spot the fleets are simply queuing up to stage their majors on the Solent from the time-honoured starting line of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes, while offshore racers stream away across Channel to some nearby and useful French port practically every summer weekend.
THE GRIFFIN PROJECT
The Griffin Project 2024 reflects this intense focus, for although it allocated 20 places out of a group of 300 applicants recruited “globally”, with two of the successful contenders – after some distinctly tough sailing tests during March - being from Northern Ireland. They are Emma McKnight from Whiterock on Strangford Lough and Daniel Corbett from Whitehead on Belfast Lough. But for the rolling out of the Griffin Project, the focus is definitely on the Channel Hotspot, with the training being largely from Cowes and the Solent on the four French-supplied JenneauSun Fast 30 ODs, hot out of the package yet re-cyclable with it.
It culminates in the RORC Cowes-St Malo Race on 5th July, with the four Griffin Project boats each allocated celebrity sailor instructors in the form of Dee Cafari, Shirley Robertson, Ian Walker and Steve Hayles.
REALITY TV?
Inevitably there’s an element of Reality TV here - it is all so very 21st Century in its intense focus on one “metropolitan” area, its use of celebrities and their star power, and its utilization of all communication techniques on a constant basis. In Ireland by contrast, what others might think to be an overly local focus, we see as reasonably acknowledging the existence of several hubs of national sailing pride.
LOCAL PRIDE
Our great classic, the biennial Round Ireland Race going clockwise, will always be a Wicklow thing. As for the likewise biennial Dun Laoghaire to Dingle, its popular and catchy short title of D2D says everything about where it simply must happen. Then there’s the new regular on the block, the Inishtearaght Race from and back to Kinsale - that will always have the Blaskets and Kinsale stamped on it. You can only race round the Aran Islands from Galway Bay Sailing Club – anything else is impossible to contemplate. And it’s unthinkable that the Ailsa Craig Race should be anything other than something that starts and finishes with the Royal Ulster YC line in Bangor on Belfast Lough.
Inishtearaght is the lighthouse island in the Blaskets Group, a spooky place whose mystique adds to the challenge of the race round it from Kinsale.
But when your fleets are mainly and very numerously located in that mid-section of the English Channel centred on the Solent-Cherbourg axis, there’s immediate focus. While it may be one of the worlds busiest shipping areas, it’s tops in the sailing numbers game, and it facilitates the offshore sport of the greatest number with most convenience.
RORC TOP THE NUMBERS GAME
Then too, the RORC online has more than 40,000-plus regular followers, so in all we are dealing with a neat setup within which resources can be readily released to fund and function what is – with just four boats – quite a modest venture when set against the extended RORC fleet in the area.
Yet here in Ireland , the strength and weakness of our sailing is in local pride. Everybody has to do their own thing in their own place, and while most would admit that Dun Laoghaire is the main centre through weight of numbers, the other significant focal points have their own strengths in places where, over the years, the successful offshore racing skippers have devised their own means of identifying emerging talent with crew potential as it manifests itself in the neighbourhood’s One-Design keelboat and dinghy fleets.
The Dublin Bay 24s, designed by Alfred Mylne, successfully served as a local One Design at Dun Laoghaire, a winner in RORC races, a successful fast cruiser, and a very effective bridge between the dinghy sailors of Dun Laoghaire and the world of offshore racing
In its day – which lasted from 1947 to 2004 – the Dublin Bay 24ft OD class provided a bridge of sorts from keen beginner to useful offshore crew. The waterfront clubs provided facilities for the university sailing clubs and their fleets, mostly of Fireflies, and canny DB24 owner/skippers kept more than a benevolent eye on how well the talent was doing in the dinghies before arranging that a fly be cast over them to bring in as DB24 crew.
Whoops…youthful experimentation with the Martin brothers’ DB24 Adastra in a punchy gust coming round the Dun Laoghaire pierhead
This all reached a sort of peak in 1963 when Stephen O’Mara’s DB24 Fenestra RIYC, amateur-skippered by Arthur Odbert, won overall in the stormy RORC Irish Sea Race with some student sailors in her crew. And other DB24s such as Ninian Falkiner’s Euphanzel and Rory O’Hanlon’s Harmony regularly drew on the pool of college sailors in Dun Laoghaire for offshore racing and distance cruising at a time when the Dun Laoghaire sailing community was more compact.
When the Dun Laoghaire sailing community was more compact – everyone shared in the celebration of the DB 24s’ Golden Jubilee in 1997. Photo: W M Nixon
It was a system which worked well in its informal way, but with changing times and greater numbers, a more structured approach was needed. The J/24 seemed to provide a useful answer for an offshore beginner boat after Philip Watson with the J/24 Pathfinder II won his class championship in the closely contended ISORA Championship of 1978.
But then the mayhem of the storm-battered 1979 Fastnet Race saw stability/ballast requirements becoming more rigorous, and the J/24 failed to meet the new standard – something the Cork J/24 fleet could have told them, as they’d already experienced something of a wipeout in heavy weather off the Old Head of Kinsale.
J/24 BASIS OF U25 SCHEME
Yet the J/24 provides so much in other ways that it became the basis of the U25 training project promoted by ICRA Chairman Nobby Reilly and initially developed at his home club of Howth. As the programme has developed, other clubs have adopted it with the most recent success being the Headcase International Campaign drawing a crew from nationwide sources, and the Kinsailor Project out of Kinsale.
Success for the ICRA U25 Project – the J/24 Headcase is race leader in the J/24 Euros at Howth in 2022
Ironically at Howth where it started, their keelboat training is now centred around a flotilla of J/80s which apparently are eligible for an IRC Certificate, but there has been no evidence of people queuing up to race them offshore.
Whatever, this has been generally done in a quiet way without the nationwide razzmatazz of the Griffin Project, for the reality is that for successful implementation of projects like this, there needs to be at least one central professional manager/bos’un/instructor and several possibly part-time associate coaches. And of course the upward move from coastal sailing to the offshore game in terms of the boat’s arrangements can be a costly business.
Thus although a very long time back, in the early 1970s, the original Asgard in her sail raining role did sterling work in providing offshore experience in a boat of comparable size to the general offshore racing fleets, it was with the growth of sailing schools that a more clearly-defined route became clear.
GLENANS IRELAND CONTRIBUTION
With Glenans Ireland from 1972 onwards at bases along the Atlantic seaboard, fresh talents like Tom Dolan began to emerge, and then the leading East Coast sailing schools in Dun Laoghaire began to offer the genuine RORC experience, though even the Round Ireland Race can be quite an organisational challenge for a fully-accredited boat from a sailing school.
Sensational. The Irish National Sailing School’s J/109 Jedi, skippered by Kenneth Rumball, makes a perfect Fastnet Race start.
Beyond that, the extra logistics of a Fastnet Race campaign from Ireland have meant that while Kenneth Rumball - of the Irish National Sailing School - has had just one very successful but extremely energy-consuming involvement in the Fastnet Race with the school’s J/109 Jedi, Ronan O Siochru’s Irish Offshore Sailing with the well-tested Sun Fast 37 Desert Star has become such a regular and often successful Fastnet contender that they’d probably get a a concerned phone call from RORC if their name didn’t show up on the entry list.
Regular contender. Irish Offshore Sailing’s Sunfast 37 Desert Star is a regular in the offshore racing scene
Desert Star’s crew with their trophy after Fastnet Race success
But with the sailing school Round Ireland and Fastnet Race packages, you get the feeling that boxes are being ticked. As in: Next year, we’ll tick off the Kilimanjiro climb. That’s not really what the ICRA U25 and RORC Griffin Project promoters are hoping to inspire, even if it is the way of life of many folk nowadays.
LIFELONG COMMITMENT
What the local club and ICRA U25 idealists hope for is the encouragement of the beginning of a lifelong commitment to sailing generally and offshore racing in particular. In titling it the Griffin Project, the RORC are harking back to a time when participation in the regular RORC programme was done with an almost religious devotion, with demand for crew places demand that the RORC was able at one time to support the campaigning of two club yachts, Griffin I and Griffin II.
Griffin I was donated to the club in 1945 by one H West in honour of his recently-deceased co-owner, the sometimes rather odd Commander George Martin. Martin had been the founding Commodore (in Plymouth in 1925) of the Ocean Racing Club, (subsequently the RORC), after he’d won the first Fastnet Race (an event he personally promoted) in his magnificent Le Havre pilot cutter Jolie Brise.
Griffin I was a mixed blessing, as she was 44ft of transom-sterned tradition, a gaff-rigged sloop admittedly without bowsprit, but definitely harking back, despite being built as recently as 1938. But in the post-war austerity, she was one answer to a shortage of crew places for keen newbies. This became so pressing that having won the 1951 Fastnet Race with his Charles A Nicholson-designed Yeoman of 1950 vintage, the great Owen Aisher got together with a subsequent owner to donate the boat to the RORC to become Griffin II, and for a while they ran both boats to cater for would-be offshore racers.
There’s an abundance of history and Crosshaven interest in this image from Cowes Week 1950. On the right is Owen Aisher’s Charles A Nicholson-designed 48ft Yeoman, which went on to be the overall winner of the 1951 Fastnet Race, and subsequently became the RORC Club Yacht Griffin II. At centre is the International 8 Metre Christina, later owned in Cork by Perry Goodbody, and now in Canada. And on the left is the Sandy Balfour-designed, Berthon-built sloop Northele, now based in Crosshaven and fully restored to prime Classic standard by the craftsmen there for locally-based owners Anthony & Sally O’Leary nee Aisher – she is Owen Aisher’s grand-daughter.
Since then, there has been a succession of RORC-owned-and-run Griffins reflecting changing boat development and sailing styles. So although other organisations have provided One Design offshore racing of some type over the years, the fresh spin put on it by the Griffin Project, with all the oomph of the RORC behind it, might well be seen in future as the real breakthrough.
TRUE ORIGINS OF OCEAN RACING
Meanwhile, with the recent Centenary of the Bermuda Race-organising Cruising Club of America, and now these memories of George Martin and the first Griffin, we found the recent monsoon conditions ideal for brooding about the real organisational origins of offshore and ocean racing as we know it today. If really cornered, we’d suggest it’s neck and neck between the Royal Cork Yacht Club and the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. Go figure.
