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Displaying items by tag: Irish National Surfing Championships

#Surfing - Only two surfers retained their titles at a delayed Irish Nationals that saw 13 new champions crowned in Bundoran last weekend, as the Irish Examiner reports.

Marginal surf was forecast for the third of three possible windows for the competition, and indeed the contest director stepped in to move the action to Tullan Strand due to inconsistent waves at The Peak early on Saturday 10 October.

It proved a change for the better, providing "tightly fought" surfing action in the men's final especially, as Sligo's Geared McDaid clinched the title from defending champ Stephen Kilfeather.

The women's division also celebrated a new champion in Sophie Pigot of Lahinch's West Coast Surf Club.

The Irish Examiner has much more on the story HERE.

Published in Surfing

The Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) Information

The creation of the Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) began in a very low key way in the autumn of 2002 with an exploratory meeting between Denis Kiely, Jim Donegan and Fintan Cairns in the Granville Hotel in Waterford, and the first conference was held in February 2003 in Kilkenny.

While numbers of cruiser-racers were large, their specific locations were widespread, but there was simply no denying the numerical strength and majority power of the Cork-Dublin axis. To get what was then a very novel concept up and running, this strength of numbers had to be acknowledged, and the first National Championship in 2003 reflected this, as it was staged in Howth.

ICRA was run by a dedicated group of volunteers each of whom brought their special talents to the organisation. Jim Donegan, the elder statesman, was so much more interested in the wellbeing of the new organisation than in personal advancement that he insisted on Fintan Cairns being the first Commodore, while the distinguished Cork sailor was more than content to be Vice Commodore.

ICRA National Championships

Initially, the highlight of the ICRA season was the National Championship, which is essentially self-limiting, as it is restricted to boats which have or would be eligible for an IRC Rating. Boats not actually rated but eligible were catered for by ICRA’s ace number-cruncher Denis Kiely, who took Ireland’s long-established native rating system ECHO to new heights, thereby providing for extra entries which brought fleet numbers at most annual national championships to comfortably above the hundred mark, particularly at the height of the boom years. 

ICRA Boat of the Year (Winners 2004-2019)