I’ve been selling the Cork 1720 number of years, mostly from Pwllheli and Abersoch.. This year I decided to compete in the Cork 1720 Irish nationals at Crosshaven, the home of the Royal Cork yacht club which is as everyone knows the oldest yacht club in the world. And it is a fantastic club in a beautiful setting.
We arrived at Crosshaven on Wednesday afternoon after taking the ferry from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire. We took most of the afternoon to drive through the countryside slowdown of course by having to trail our Cork 1720.
There was a field of 15 Cork 1720 boats. The first race on Friday wasn’t quite light airs and after several recalls we got away quite well. Racing Cork 1720 is notorious for its recall is. Eventually we got away quite well (aided of course by the wot-tac telling us where the start line bias was). We got round the weather mark fifth and we decided to use a light spinnaker sheet on our 1720 and we did a dinghy type knot on the clew. However, when we hoisted the kite the sheet just slipped up and down the clew with no control of the sail at all. It took us to the whole leg to sort it out and we lost a few places watching our competitors in their Cork 1720s passing us by. Eventually we finished seventh.
The second race started well and we had another good start as we were using the wot tac to get our Cork 1720 on the right line bias. We were placed sixth coming up to the finish but we were on port tack and didn’t see Cork 1720 on starboard tack until the very last second when we just managed to bear off round her stern. We did just clip the transom of the other Cork 1720. Fortunately we let off the main sheet in time and we just made it without T boning the boat. In the chaos we missed the finished and by the time we did cross over the line in our Cork 1720 we had dropped to 11th.
