Antix flies home flag as Tonnerre delivers again

Racing at Cork warmed up with the improved weather yesterday as a full programme of competition was completed in all nine events under IRC and again under ECHO handicaps.

Class Zero saw improved form for Anthony O’Leary’s Antix from the Royal Cork Yacht Club after a dismal opening day on Monday where the 39-footer had two sixth places. A fourth and a second yesterday brought Antix back towards podium contention, though the class already has a runaway leader, thanks in no small part to the local knowledge provided by George Kenefick.

Dutch entry Tonnerre de Breskens, owned by Piet Vroon, delivered another two race wins yesterday in a remarkable display of consistency that is setting up for a straight win result for the series.

However, this class is also being used as a warm-up for next week’s Brewin Dolphin Commodores’ Cup series in Cowes with two of the key contenders using Cork Week for training.

“This breeze was still a bit shifty today, with patches on the runs and beats,” said Tom Murphy who is crewing with Jamie McWilliam’s Hong Kong entry Peninsula’s Signal 8. “On the first race, we were leading by six minutes at the first mark but finished (only) two minutes ahead at the bottom mark.

“Our bowman did go over the side for an unintended swim but we grabbed him at the stern as he passed by. Luckily he’s a pretty fit South African chap and he managed to climb back but we had to round up to do this and lost time.”

There were plenty of other incidents around the fleet, especially after the breeze freshened later in the day and the Crosshaven RNLI lifeboat was called to standby a white sails entry that was holed above the waterline in a collision. The civil defence boat with a medical team on board also stood by, though nobody was hurt in the incident.

However, most of the drama was contained to the actual racing on the busy second day.

“It was an up and down day for us,” commented Maurice ‘Prof’ O’Connell, tactician on Richard Fildes’ Impetuous from Wales, competing in Class One. “We felt we had a great start in the first race, did a fantastic job in all our manoeuvres and got some nice tactical moves on the Swedish boat going down the run. Then we got a deafening silence from the committee boat as we crossed finishing-line and found we were over the line at the start.”

The boat was disqualified from that race and once ashore a new handheld VHF radio was purchased to listen for the announcements of infringing boats as it emerged that Impetuous’s deck speaker wasn’t working.

Fildes team went on to win the second race of the day in a return to their opening day’s form.

Nevertheless, class one saw plenty of other upsets yesterday.

Richard Goransson’s Inga from Sweden was involved in mark rounding incident that led to a protest from Norbert Reilly’s Howth entry Crazy Horse. The Swede was disqualified from the second race which bumped the leaderboard up a place and Conor Phelan’s Jump Juice from the Royal Cork YC became the overnight leader.

The single event discard comes into force after today’s first race and the class is certain to tighten once more.

Today’s round of races for the two fleets is again expected to have moderate breezes and to continue shifty. However, the introduction of the race discard across the classes will also tighten the results across all nine divisions, notably in Class Two where 25 boats are competing and include five J109’s sailing for their Irish national title.

John Hall’s Something Else leads overall in both the J109s and the class with close competition in both by second placed Ian Nagle and Paul O’Malleys’ Jelly Baby from the Royal Cork YC.