This year we were in a quandary… go IRC2 again or go Coastal? We’d signed up for IRC2 when we entered over the winter as that’s what we won last time. However the format back then was slightly different, comprising a ‘Wrecks series’ of coastal racing for the first half of week. As we won the Wrecks Series overall, did we need to go Coastal this year to defend our title? With some crew wanting to go coastal anyway, we swapped out from IRC2 at registration. Had we done the right thing?
Cork Week has always been a crew favourite and after our IRC2 win in 2018, there was absolutely no hesitationfrom our crew to join us again this year. It always seems to have the pick of the summer weather and champagne sailing followed by a great party atmosphereafter sailing.
Photo by Deirdre Horgan
This year we were in a quandary… go IRC2 again or go Coastal? We’d signed up for IRC2 when we entered over the winter as that’s what we won lasttime. However the format back then was slightly different, comprising a ‘Wrecks series’ of coastal racing for the first half of week. As we won the WrecksSeries overall, did we need to go Coastal this year to defend our title? With some crew wanting to go coastal anyway, we swapped out from IRC2 at registration.Had we done the right thing?
One half of the crew were still trying to convince us to go back to the faster paced IRC2 racing. We’d also heard that many of the boats entered asIRC0 and IRC1 had also swapped to coastal. How could we possibly compete with class zero boats? But not wanting to upset the race office by switching backand forth, the class flag was raised at the backstay and we stuck with coastal.
It was amazing to be able to line up with the bigger boats such as Signal 8 and Pata Negra but as soon as the starting gun went, we could barelysee them, making it difficult to gauge how we were doing in the race. We calculated that Signal 8 gave us about 15mins per hour on handicap. All wecould do was sail as best we could and amazingly we won the first race.
A third place on Wednesday and we realised we were up against a polished crew on Signal 8, so we’d certainly have to push to get a good result.It all came down to the last day. Some could say we were lucky with the wind shifts but we really have to thank our crew for paying close attention to thoseshifts. All eyes were concentrating hard, looking out for wind holes and spotting the inevitable sea breeze.
When it filled in we pushed Mojito hard with the kite up, screaming across the bay to the finish, crossing the whole of the 1720 fleet on port inthe process. That final push worked and we won the last race, meaning we won the coastal class overall.