Irish remain on course for victory

THE penultimate day of the Rolex Commodore’s will be staged today with a 50-mile Round the Isle of Wight race, in which Ireland will face a significant challenge to maintain its overall lead of the event that has eluded Irish victors for almost two decades.

Yesterday saw the three Irish boats dominate in the single Long-Inshore course around the Solent close to Cowes and ended with several more points added to the team’s already comfortable points cushion.

However, two higher-scoring races remain to be sailed and the event can still easily be lost as has occurred for several previous Irish squads.

Anthony O’Leary’s Antix won Class 1 yesterday while Dave Dwyer’s marinerscove.ie took third in Class 2.

The provisional Class 3 result listed Ireland’s Roxy 6 as winner having been second on the water for much of the race.

Rockall III of the second-placed Hong Kong team had been leading, but apparently missed a course change and sailed to the wrong mark, before returning to finish second-last. That result was protested by Hong Kong and redress was awarded, with first place re-instated to Rockall III.

Ireland still has today’s race that counts for 1.5 times points multiplier while tomorrow’s final counts for double points.

Gear failure and not other teams has become a critical issue to avoid.

On return to the marina yesterday, each of the three boat-crews immediately began full inspections of every piece of equipment that might possibly fail in the expected tough conditions today.

“We’re just going to keep our head down and keep grinding out the best results we can,” said Barry Rose, Commodore of the Irish Crusier Racing Association in Cowes last night. “We’re preparing the boats thoroughly tonight and hoping we don’t have any gear failure.”

Ex-pat Jamie McWilliam from Hong Kong’s Blondie IV remained determined that the Irish lead can be over-turned. “It’s quite a big ask though it has happened before so we’ll see,” said McWilliam.

“It’s almost at the point where its out of our hands, we just have to go out there and do everything we can and hope the Irish fellas have a bit of an unlucky moment,” he said yesterday. “Of course, nobody will want to wish any misfortune on anyone – we don’t want anyone to, say drop a rig to give us a chance.”

As only Hong Kong and France Blue can now mathematically beat Ireland, based on solid wins and disasters, nobody is taking chances with bad luck by making predictions.