Would the REAL Fastnet Race Course Records Please Stand Up & Salute Like Everyone Else……
7th April 2021
Record-holder: the 1926-vintage 70ft Fife cutter Hallowe en, syndicate-owned at the Royal Irish YC, set the first significant Fastnet Race record in 1926 – Hallowe en s time stood for thirteen years through ten races
Credit: W M Nixon
Well done to the MOD 70 PowerPlay on almost managing to make the 24 hours for a Fastnet Race course finishing at Plymouth. But we d suggest in all modesty (we re tops for it) that what they were sailing was NOT the original Fastnet Race course.
Back in the 1920s when the notion of a Fastnet race was first mooted, the conservative Cowes establishment would have nothing to do with such a crazy idea, and thus the first Fastnet Race in 1925 started eastward out of Solent from the Royal Victoria YC at Ryde, and then westward south of St Catherine s Point to sail the traditional course thereafter, finishing at Plymouth.
16th January 2021
Conor Doyle s xP50 Freya from Kinsale is currently the largest entrant for the Volvo Dun Laoghaire-Dingle Race on June 9th. She is seen here winning the Kinsale-Monkstown Race in a record two hours, but the course record she challenges in the race to Dingle was set by a 94-footer, Mick Cottter s Windfall in 2019
Credit: Robert Bateman
It s getting to be like a game of skittles in the planned lineup of high-profile 2021 events which everybody - way back in the dark depths of earlier pandemic lockdowns – thought would surely come to pass in the remote sunlit heights of what was then the distant future of supposedly plague-free 2021.