It seems like many moons and tides ago that the 2024 season started and indeed we kicked off the year with a new years camp with our dedicated national champion coaches, Michael Crosbie and Jonathan O’Shaughnessy aided by Micheal O’Suilleabhain. Eleven brave sailors got rigged and ready and we had an excellent three day start to the season.
Micheal O’S has been a fantastic supporter of the laser fleet and former National champion and elite sailor in multiple classes really added great expertise to kick off the year. He compliments and fine tunes the regular coaching in these more intense sessions. Michael is in his final stretch at UCC and we will find it challenging to bring him in for coaching until after his final exams.
We also welcomed some new sailors to the fleet with Conor Barry joining as a master. Conor had sailed as junior with Trevor Millar of Sailcoach as his original coach and wanted to get ready for a campaign involving the Munsters and then the Irish masters event in May. Having the new masters sail with the new juniors all in one fleet benefits all the sailors and speeds up progress for those new to the class.
Sometimes when the waters are quiet, we get to see some amazing scenes and January 24 gave the sailors a treat with the porpoises inside the harbour looking for company.
Tom Mapplebeck secured the coaching expertise from two other national champions, Michael Crosbie and Jonathan O’Shaughnessy to focus on the ILCA class in 2024 and having dedicated coaches to the class made a big difference for setting out training programmes for different periods in the year. In 2025 Caoimhe Foster is also joining in the senior coaching group for ILCAs to add her expertise and support the growing fleet of female sailors.
The ILCA Ireland event season normally starts at the beginning of April with two regional events followed by the Irish masters in May which means that sailors have to raise coaching intensity early in the year to be competitive by April. Some Irish sailors involved in ISA or RYA academys head for week long camps in Valencia or Vilamoura in preparation for the season and we are aware that our sailors also need that early season intensity in training and racing in order to be competitive.
The new public holiday, St Bridget’s weekend also provided an unbelievably beautiful weekend of sailing with sunshine and almost teeshirt temperature sailing. Taking advantage of these early season higher intensity weekends builds a stronger fleet.
After St Bridgets, we welcomed the ILCA 4 academy to Cork during Feb Mid term who agreed to race with our local fleet to provide that larger fleet start and some high level racing.
We had over twenty boats on the water over a three day period and this also provided an opportunity for the ISA coaches to get an intro to our fleet which can often be off the Dun Laoghaire based ISA’s radar. Rain turned to sunshine again and some intensive three day early season coaching was completed. We will endeavor to bring the ISA teams back to RCYC again in 2025 to race against them and look for coaching tips that can benefit our fleet. The intention is for the ISA coaching team to keep in touch with our coaching team and look to attract sailors to Royal Cork’s winter program from clubs who do not offer winter training. This is not to steal sailors, but to build a strong healthy fleet sailing in the early season that can develop and potentially produce stronger sailors who can move into ISA led programs. More to come in 2025.
Early international season events began in late February when Andrew Kingston and Michael Doherty headed to Vilamoura for the Grand prix event which is a two part series with one rounds one normally in December and round two in February. Sailors can enter either round or both and given location and timing the event attracts an extremely high standard fleet. The availability of direct flights from Cork to Faro and extremely cheap accomodation in February means that it is a very accessible event for our sailors to get top quality racing early in the season.
In February 2024, our two sailors were really treated to top quality sailing with four Olympic sailors racing as part of their buildup for Marseille. Hannah Snellgrove from UK, Line Flem Hoest from Norway, Sarah Douglas from Canada and Josefin Olsson from Sweden all showed up and put on an amazing display of elite senior sailing as part of their Olympic buildup. These ladies have been senior elite sailors for over fifteen years with multiple Olympic campaigns. This shows the merits of sailing a class like the laser/ILCA where juniors and seniors race together and diffrentiates the class from many of the other dinghy classes such as 29ers which is not an olympic class and a transition class sailed mostly by juniors.
The achievement of Andrew beating these sailors in a couple of races and ending up in tenth spot overall is an experience well worth the effort of travelling and stands out among Youth sailor achievements in Royal Cork in 2024. Racing at this level against senior athletes is impossible in other fleets, incredibly hard to find and the Grand Prix event will be a focus for our sailors again in 2025. The Vilamoura sailing team were leveraging Michael regularly in their social posts and he made a signigicant improvement in his race starts.
Fast starts and avoiding the start line carnage in a large fleet is a very challenging skill to learn and with Irish fleet sizes so small in between events, it is impossible to replicate in week to week coaching. So many junior sailors try to hide behind committee boat prior to the start and then rush the line with seconds to go, but this is not a strategy that works in larger European and world fleets. So in order to get some more experience and to keep pushing ahead, three Royal Cork sailors headed to Weymouth in March for a UK qualifier.
We towed the club three boat stacker trailer to Weymouth which removed any charter costs and with ferry costs shared across three sailors along with accomodation and diesel came in under three hundred euros a sailor. We found accomodation in March a few hundred metres from the club which allowed the sailors to walk to and from the accomodation. Lidl is situated at the club and provided any food required. A nightime ferry arrived in early to Pembroke and we were well ahead of any morning traffic near Bristol to get to Weymouth under four hours on the UK side. The return leg can also be accessed with a night time ferry departing at 2pm and arriving back in Cork for 9am. All in all, very straightforward logistics. Thanks to Ed Rice for providing the providing the logistics plan.
The WPNSA is famous for having hosted the London Olympics and its sailing logistics are extremely high with massive slip access to the water. A fantastic display inside the clubhouse gives you great information from near the race course with wind speeds, direction, trends etc. The UK laser association (ilca.uk) organise large events at WPNSA which have been called UK open qualifiers in the past. In 2025, they are renamed to National Opens. There are two in March 2025, 15, 16th and the following week 22nd, 23rd. These are high quality large fleet events that prep sailors for a busy April. ILCA 4 had 54 sailors, ilca 6 had 79 sailors and ilca 7 had 31 starting.
The standard of racing in the fleets is very high with seniors such as Jon Emmet who is now a regular coach to Olympic hopefuls but still sails regularly and has an active instructive instagram account.
Many Sailcork students would have heard of Portland Bill, a promontory with a lighthouse and lots of squiggly marks on the charts to indicate pretty rough outfall if youre caught on the wrong tide.
Back to the racing, with such a big field, Sean and Michael struggled with the starts, but that was the reason they came – to practice and find a way to get off that line in prep for events later in season. Andrew Kingston also had a challenging first day when he fell foul of an unusual ruling regarding numbering. It was unusual enough that a new rule to clarify it was added to all later ukla events. Due to very similar sail numbers, the committee wanted all ILCA sailors to use the number of the boat hull on the sail and to use an equipment subsitution request form if you were using a sail number that differed. In ILCA events, there has been a tradition of using a lot of 1’s on the sail to reduce the footprint of the sail number and avoid your number being read when OCS. lots of 211114, 21111, 211116 numbers out there…If you are going to a UKLA event, “Read the SIs” and take a good note of this particular rule..It hasn’t been present on ILCA Ireland SIs, but due to duplicate sail numbers, some level of number crack down will come in. !! In the end, it resulted in a disastrous scoring penalty. On day two, a second place and forth place were not enough to get him back into top 10. Ben Elvin, a master of 41 won with Jon Emmet finished second overall with many junior sailors learning a huge amount from sailing with these top class sailors.
The first main Irish event of the year scheduled every year for Baltimore on Easter weekend which fell on March 30/31st. As is our recent tradition, to help sailors who have not stepped up to regional events before, we had a coaching session on the Friday followed by Pizza overlooking the harbour.
As part of that tradition, the sun came out and we had a great days sailing. One of our sailing families did try to wake up the whole village of Baltimore on Friday evening when the exterior gable wall of their rental house went up in flames due to issues on the stove chimney. Fire engines from Skibbereen were on the spot quickly and no one was hurt, but definitely seeing fireman in action is now crossed off their bucket list.
The Munsters is always an enjoyable event both on and off the water. Racing was as efficient as ever with Ciaran McSweeney as Race officer and very little delays between race starts at that time of year is critical. Healthy wind between 15kt and 20kts with some gusts into early 20s allowed for super racing. In ILCA 4 Maeve Leonard showed her evergreen class finishing fourth overall with a poor final race that pushed her off the podium. She was unimpressed when I told her that she is now an apprentice master and would start to qualify for masters prizes. She is still beating the youngsters. Rory Whyte came in just behind Maeve after two second places and Craig O’Neill was on fire two places behind rueing a DNC in the first race on Saturday. Also after a poor first day, Rachel Hyde came through with a race win which really pulled her up the leaderboard. Rachel’s race win was the only race win from all RCYC’s sailors over the weekend.
In ILCA 6, Bobby Driscoll from Ballyholme coming from academy training dominated from the start with four race wins in his first four starts. Andrew K came in fourth after a mixed second day pushed him off the podium. Michael Doherty showed some of his hard work paying off with a second place in Race 6 and 12th overall. Conor Barry after welcoming a new baby boy Finn a few weeks before managed to compete and came in second master. In ILCA 7, RstGYC master Conor Byrne managed to beat coach Jonathan O’Shaughnessy who had yet to shake off his winter of coaching other sailors. All in all, a pretty good start showing progress from the early season focus. The Royal Cork fleet has to compete with several sailors in ISA and RYA academy programs and the majorty of the current fleet did not come through the Optimist racing scene and started racing later which requires even more effort to get competitive.
In the early season, there is no rest for the fleet and direct from Baltimore the fleet returned to Royal Cork for the Irish Sailing youth championships on Thursday, April 4th. There were many months of preparation for the Youths by event director, Tim McCarthy and a steady stream of visiting boats arrived from Monday 1st. Although the initial picture here shows serenity, it was the calm before storm and Kathleen was brewing.
The ILCA 6s were scheduled for four days of racing beginning on Thursday 4th and Cuskinny was the designated race course. Twenty nine sailors entered with five boys and onegirl representing Royal Cork. The fleet sailed across the harbour in a mist and at that point a solid Easterly breeze. It later strengthened and veered Southerly which required full race course adjustment. Bobby Driscoll continued his fine form from the munsters in Baltimore by taking the first three races, however he was behind at the final windward mark in two races and showed real class in passing the leaders. Lucy Ives came in a strong second in the first race and Lewis Thompson was a close second in the second race after leading by several boats lengths. Race officer Anthony O’Leary was determined to get a fourth race in as the forecast for the remaining three days looked ominous. By the time of the fourth race, the southerly breeze was gusting 20 kts at times and a significant chop had developed in Cuskinny. Andrew Kingston had been sailing well with a fourth, third and fourth and then took a bullet in the fourth race to get to second overall behind Bobby. Megan O’Sullivan came in fifth girl with Michael Doherty not far behind in 16th overall.
Kathleen did turn out to be as ferocious as forecasted and that turned out to be the end of sailing for the the event with no racing at all for the ILCA 4s. The presentation was held on Saturday 6th to allow sailors pack up and return home early.
Another interesting rules aside: One of our sailors while on an upwind leg at the top end of the fleet was accidently rammed by a jury rib which was concentrated on another competitor. It took our sailor 30 secs to maybe a minute to get untangled from the jury boat and was left in irons before getting going again, by which time several boats had passed. At the conclusion of racing, he did inform the committee boat of his intention to seek redress for the actions of the jury boat. Race officer Anthony O’Leary showing his many years of experience in protest rooms wished the sailor well with an ironic smile – “best of luck to get a result from protesting the jury”. And indeed that was very sage advice. It turns out that jury boats hitting competitors isn’t covered in sailing rules anywhere. At a very heated protest meeting, the jury ruled out any redress and put all blame for the incident on the sailor with the collision regs rule 8 – avoiding collisions being used as the basis of the ruling. Never assume the powered rib in the middle of the sailing race will avoid you !! It indicated that the sailor should have hailed the jury boat (we normally tell sailors to avoid contact with the jury boat, especially not yelling at the jury to move) and crash tacked away from jury boat as it approached. In reality, there was no time for this manoevre. It found no fault with the location of the jury boat in the middle of leading competitors or the fact that the jury boat was under power. By the way, no appeals are allowed in the Irish Youths championships. Lessons learned – We would never put our sailors in that position again where they protested the jury. Always treat the jury as infallible. Do not put a youth sailor in a position to argue a case against a fully adult jury. Our coach who was the observer was stunned with the tone of the adults toward the junior sailor. The performance of the jury toward a youth sailor with a pretty valid request was recorded and feedback provided to ISA. So taking Anthony’s advice – when its the jury, don’t bother waste any time lodging protests.
Keeping up the busy April schedule, the PY pursuit race attracted its usual eclectic mixture of dinghies and the course was set as a windward, leeward in the river outside the club. The pursuit format allows for seome excellent viewing with larger N18s tracking down the smaller dinghies and gobbling them up along the race course. In a light westerly breeze, the N18s again tracked down all the other classes and claimed victory. Sean O’Herlihy was the last laser standing.
The ILCA Ireland Connaught championships arrived on April 27th/28th in Lough Rae yacht club. It is another very historic club in a beautiful location with a western aspect across Lough Rae just outside the town of Athlone.
Royal Cork had eleven sailors across the ILCA 4 and ILCA 6 classes. The first day of racing began on a very crisp cool morning with some of the visiting campers discussing ice buildup on their tents overnight. The day soon warmed up and a light breeze filled in. It remained fickle however and caused numerous starts and a race cancellation for the ILCA 7s on their second upwind which had turned into a downwind leg. In the evening, the club provided a very well attended evening candlelight dinner with some sailors struggling to leave such a fantastic setting watching the sun set to the west. IT was the first occasion for most sailors to this venue and indeed to Co. Westmeath.
The results after Sundays racing were all about the Andrews !!. in ILCA 4, Andrew O’Neill came in a strong third just ahead of Eolann Miles and Rory Whyte after a very strong regatta. Royal Cork’s Stephen O’Shaughnessy was on hand to present him with his prize.
In ILCA 6, Andrew Kingston dominated day one with three wins and stayed ahead of Daniel Palmer when they lost one race due to restarts. The Race officer had to reduce series to five races and finish them after the ILCA 4s after a number of general recalls. The light fickle wind had caused a number of pile ups.
After his successful early season campaign, Andrew Kingston was drafted into the ISA academy to train alongside Bobby Driscoll, Sienna Wright, Lewis Thompson, Daniel Palmer and Charlie Keating. The return on the early season effort was highlighted and we hope to replicate that programme in 2025 with any of our sailors looking to move to that elite level of ILCA racing.
The Start of May also heralded the beginning of the club racing season and a move to Wednesday evening for the laser class allowed for some excellent early season club racing alongside 420s, 29er, Topper, N18s.
There were a number of our sailors who also competed in Schools team racing Munsters and all Irelands in Bantry Bay SC.
Putting it all together, it was one of the busiest early seasons we have ever completed and being able to build up the fleet and seeing some positive results from the effort our coaches, Michael and Jonathan put in was very satisfying.
Part II of this end of season review will cover the ILCA Sprint Series, the European Youths at Ballyholme, the UK Nationals, the Irish Nationals, Sprint finale at Royal Cork, October league, Frostbites and End of Season awards.
It is indeed a pleasure to be involved with the ILCA class that cross all boundaries of sailing from Youth to Grandmaster with sailors sharing racecourses with Olympic Athletes at some amazing venues in Ireland and further afield. There is no other comparable class in operation at Royal Cork.
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