Sailing on Saturday with WM Nixon

What’s not to like? The RORC’s new Griffin Project features the Jeanneau Sun Fast 30 OD. Very zippy - yet ultimately recyclable - she is light years away from the first club-owned Griffin, a 44ft gaff sloop of 1938 origins

Royal Ocean Racing Club’s Griffin Training Scheme Focused On The Channel Hot Spot

13th April 2024 W M Nixon

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…

The Italian Class40 Alla Grande Pirelli in the 2023 Normandy Channel Race, which took in turning marks at the Tuskar and Fastnet Rocks. The first of the Class40 fleet – the French boat Unicorn – confirmed entry this week in the 2024 SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race from Wicklow on June 22nd

This “Wipeout Weekend” Should Demonstrate Resilience of Ireland’s Sailing

6th April 2024 W M Nixon

This weekend is expected to see the Entry List for the SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race on June 22nd going through the 40 mark, with a good selection of boats already providing a healthy mix of internationally-renowned craft lining up…

Claud Monet’s impression of the August 1900 Sailing Olympics at Le Havre. This was the first modern Olympic Sailing event ever completed on salt water, and was the second stage of a two-part regatta in which Part 1 had been raced on the River Seine near Paris in May. A sailing event had been scheduled for the first modern Olympiad at Athens in 1896, but persistent gales on the Aegean Sea made its staging impossible. Image Courtesy MM

Will Sailing’s Olympic Divide Get Ever Wider?

30th March 2024 W M Nixon

Olympians are different from you and me. In the final analysis, that’s what being Olympian is all about. For whether we like it or not, the vivid clarity of an Olympic medal is one of the few ways that sailing…

Storming along to the big win in Tangier. Eve McMahon was to show grace under pressure in maintaining a very clear lead in the ILCA U21 Worlds in Tangier

Irish Sailor of the Year Eve McMahon is Spirit of the Age

22nd March 2024 W M Nixon

Friday evening’s announcement of the Irish Sailor of the Year 2023 title for 19-year-old Eve McMahon at her sailing home of Howth Yacht Club well captures the zeitgeist of mid-2020s Ireland, not least in the fact that the title holder…

The ultra-mix of sailing and the inland waterways – the century-old Shannon One Design Class transitting the lock in Athlone during their annual downriver race from Lough Ree to Lough Derg

Ireland’s Inland Waterways Assert Their Individuality As IWAI’s 70th Anniversary Arrives

16th March 2024 W M Nixon

If you were trying to think of the most utterly rural town in all Ireland, Longford would certainly be among the top ten - maybe tops of all. And our rustic view of it is emphasised by the fact that…

The Last Hurrah. The late Clayton Love Jnr and regular crewman Neil Hegarty revel in racing the 505 Miss Betty in IYA Dinghy Week in July 1970 at Ballyholme on Belfast Lough. This was to be Clayton Love’s last actively dinghy racing season, and it was also the last Dinghy Week, as the event had become too big for most sailing centres to handle

Clayton Love Jnr 1929-2024

9th March 2024 W M Nixon

The widely-mourned death of Clayton Love Jnr of Cork at the age of 94 may leave a void in the lives of his very large circle of family, friends and colleagues in many parts of the world and numerous areas…

Heather Kennedy, daughter of Ruffian 23 designer Billy Brown of Portaferry, with National Yacht Club Commodore Peter Sherry at the presentation of the shared MG Motor “Sailing Club of the Year 2024” award

MG Motor “Sailing Club of the Year 2024 ” Award Jointly To National YC & Ruffian 23 Association In Celebration Of Family & Friendship In Sailing

2nd March 2024 W M Nixon

Friendship, family and sailing enjoyment expressed enthusiastically through quietly efficient organisations - that was the warm theme which dominated Thursday evening’s convivial gathering in the National Yacht Club on Dun Laoghaire waterfront. The successful hosting club and the Golden Jubilee-celebrating…

Ballyholme Bay looking southeast – it is ideally located between town and country, and used to be within handy bike free-wheel distance of Bangor Grammar School

The Northern Lights of Ireland’s Top Sailing

24th February 2024 W M Nixon

Back in the day, Bangor Grammar School was seen by a small but significant sector of its pupils as a sailing school with a grammar problem. This was in a time when it was an establishment of friendly size, located…

ICC Commodore David Beattie’s steel cutter Reespray at the Fastnet Rock. As her hull lines are based on Joshua Slocum’s world-girdling Spray, this means that the basic shape is more than 250 years old

Irish Cruising Club Celebrates Four Years Of Success With David Beattie As Commodore

17th February 2024 W M Nixon

Last night’s Annual General Meeting of the 1929-founded Irish Cruising Club in Dublin was more than the usual agenda-guided review of a year of activity afloat, a time-honoured long look at twelve months of varied cruising and voyaging on waters…

Sailing history comes alive in Half Ton Classic racing at Kinsale. The 1976 Farr-designed Swuzzlebubble - now owned by James Dwyer of Royal Cork – is current ICRA “Boat of the Year”, while the blue Humphreys-designed 1985 Checkmate XV won outgoing ICRA Commodore Dave Cullen of Howth the Half Ton Classics Cup in Belgium in 2018

Ireland’s Cruiser-Racer Dreams Are In The Caribbean, Reality Is In Dublin Bay

10th February 2024 W M Nixon

The weather may have decided that winter is far from gone in the last couple of days, but in Dun Laoghaire this morning, the annual conference of the Irish Cruiser Racing Association at the Royal Irish YC remembers only sun-filled…

Laurent Charmy’s J/111 SL Energies Groupe Fastwave from France was the narrow overall winner of the 2022 SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race from Wicklow, closely ahead of the J/99 Snapshot (Mike & Richard Evans, Howth YC)

SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race From Wicklow In June Attracts Broad Range of Early Entries

3rd February 2024 W M Nixon

It’s one thing to declare an interest in contesting an up-coming iteration of the biennial 704-mile SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race from Wicklow. But it is quite something else to divvy up an entry fee, and sign on the dotted…

The real party begins at home – Royal Cork YC’s new Admiral Annamarie Fegan (second left beside husband Denis Murphy) celebrates aboard Nieulargo on return to Crosshaven after winning the Fastnet 450 Race. Total lineup is (left to right, back): Denis, Annamarie and Molly Murphy, Mark ‘Nipper’ Murphy (no relation), Killian Collins and Clive O'Shea. (Front): Mia Murphy, Cian Byrne, James Fegan and Nin O'Leary

Royal Cork’s New Admiral Demonstrates Sailing In Ireland’s Leading Role In Gender Equality Process

27th January 2024 W M Nixon

This week’s election of Annamarie Fegan as Admiral of the Royal Cork Yacht Club, the first woman sailor to fill the top posting in this extraordinary organisation’s 304-year history, is remarkable in that it doesn’t seem to have been seen…

The Royal Irish Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire has the world’s oldest original purpose-designed complete clubhouse, with its classical premises dating from 1850. Yet while this has been meticulously preserved, the harbour and marina have conveniently re-arranged themselves round it to provide a unique combination of living history and modern facilities

Dun Laoghaire Will Welcome J/109 Euros To Royal Irish YC’s Late Season Array Of Cruiser/Racer Championships

20th January 2024 W M Nixon

The latest news on the Dun Laoghaire waterfront is that the J/109 Europeans 2024 will be part of this year’s intense series of cruiser/racer regattas at the Royal Irish YC in late August and early September. It’s an organisational breakthrough…

The Reichel/Pugh-designed Rolex Sydney-Hobart 2023 overall winning 66 footer Alive from Tasmania would be considered a veteran of significant age in many other sailing areas, but the Australian philosophy of constant modification and up-dating with continuous input from designer Jim Pugh makes her better than new each time out

Rolex Sydney-Hobart – The Rugged Race With A Sunny Face

13th January 2024 W M Nixon

There’s something about the annual 628-mile Rolex-Sydney Hobart Race that lends it to endless angles of speculation and re-analysis long after the event. We’re already a fortnight clear of the final postings of the results, yet the real anoraks and…

Summertime at the National Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire, with an International ILCA event under way and former Commodore Conor O'Regan's world-girdling Rival 38 Panima alongside

National Yacht Club and Ruffian Association Share MG Motor “Sailing Club of the Year 2024” Award

6th January 2024 Sailing Club of the Year

It is not unprecedented for leading clubs and one of the key class organisations within their ambit to share the MG Motor Sailing Club of the Year Award. It began with an added convention (the informal contest has been based…

The turning point. Until mid-August 2023, it seemed increasingly possible that Ireland would not qualify for a place in any sailing class in the 2024 Paris Olympics, at that time just eleven months away. But then Finn Lynch secured qualification for the ILCA 7 at the Sailing Worlds 2023 in The Netherlands (above), and in November Robert Dickson & Sean Waddilove did the same for the 49er at the Euros in Portugal. The tide had well and truly turned

Afloat.ie’s “Sailors of the Month” Highlight Variety of 2023’s Achievements In Selecting “Irish Sailor of the Year 2023”

30th December 2023 W M Nixon

Afloat.ie has already clocked 2.1 million readers during 2023, so we’re communicating with a large and often international readership, although the core of our regular visitors is still very much in Ireland. And now, with just one day to go…