We tied up alongside the pier at the Wicklow Sailing Club just after midnight on June 28, following a five-day, 11-hour voyage in the latest edition of the SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race. Along the way on this 720-nautical-mile spin around the Emerald Isle, sailing aboard Barry O’Donovan’s solid Beneteau 44.7, Black Magic, I’d seen the so-called “40 shades of green,” as Johnny Cash once crooned. We’d also had dead calms, thick fog, swirling currents and, over the final, interminable 24 hours, persistent 25-knot headwinds on the nasty Irish Sea. It had been a memorable trip, and I was seriously gassed.
As I wobbled onto the pier, my gait unsteady, I asked my mate who’d greeted us if the docks were moving. He looked at me like I was insane. “Um, it’s a concrete pier,” he said. “It doesn’t move.” Luckily, at the end of the breakwater stood the host club’s compact headquarters—a veritable oasis. Moments later, I was safely planted on a bar stool sipping a fresh pint of Guinness. I’ve downed a few beers in my day, but none tasted better.
As it had prior to the race’s start, the Wicklow Sailing Club—some 30 miles south of Dublin on Ireland’s eastern shore—was the gift that just kept giving. There are larger, more prestigious Irish yacht clubs—the Royal Cork Yacht Club and the Kinsale Yacht Club leap to mind—but the fact that the funky little WSC puts on the nation’s premier offshore yacht race (one the bigger clubs covet) is a major part of its appeal.
The Round Ireland Race was first run in 1980 with a fleet of 13 boats. This year’s event attracted 59 entrants. It’s quite easily the lovely port city’s major biennial undertaking. The whole town turns out for the start, with live music and plenty of food trucks, a proper festival of sail.
The current commodore, Karen Kissane, told me: “I’m not a great sailor. I like it when it’s calm. I don’t understand this heeling-over business.” Like many WSC members, she joined after her 8-year-old daughter got involved with the club’s junior sailing program and her husband took sailing lessons there. “Now I really love it here,” she said. “Everybody knows each other. It’s very welcoming. Sometimes you get sailing clubs that can be kind of snooty. There’s none of that here. We’re all just like one big family.”
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That family really comes together for the Round Ireland festivities. The club will celebrate its 75th anniversary next year, but the race has become its signature affair, and everyone chips in. “We’d be lost without our volunteers,” Kissane said. “Everything here is volunteer-led. The only staff that’s paid is the barmaid. And they’re amazing because when the boats start coming back in, it’s 24 hours a day. We don’t close during the race. We can track them on the race tracker, and we know within an hour when they’re going to be here.”
That was certainly the case in the wee hours of our arrival, when another quartet of boats finished within an hour. And that first Guinness was just the start of a party that lasted past dawn. But the best part was when one of my Black Magic crew tapped me on the shoulder and said, “C’mon. Breakfast.”
I always limit my food intake when I sail offshore. I had basically been living on apples and protein bars for the previous five days and was famished. In the next room over, a posse of volunteers were dishing up the full Irish breakfast: fried eggs, baked beans, mushrooms, sausages, black pudding, and hot toast with creamy Irish butter—heaven.
It was, no kidding, one of the best meals of my life. And one more reason I fell in love with Wicklow.
