Nautical but nice

CROSSHAVEN is the perfect place for an event as social as Ford Cork Week a regatta fast becoming a major highlight of the world's yachting calendar.

This year, the event attracted its biggest number of entries 500 boats which means roughly 5,000 competitors all piling in to the tiny holiday village. Just to put that in [perspective, the entire Olympics has 10,000 competitors.

The biannual event is organised by the Royal Cork Yacht Club (which prides itself on being the oldest yacht club in the world) which made for a busy week for its admiral, accountant Conor O'Donovan and his Lady Admiral wife, Brenda. Every night this week they have taken a table and entertained in the surprisingly informal clubhouse several members proudly described the club's informality to me by comparing it with the stiff upper lip, jacket and tie sedateness of its Dun Laoghaire counterparts.

Outside the clubhouse there is a vibrant open to anybody tented village with restaurants and bars with live music until the early hours proving that the yachting fraternity (and it is overwhelmingly male) are a very hardy bunch able to survive and even compete on an average of five hours sleep a night.

A very high spirited John Bruton performed the opening ceremony and dined in the club with Cork's A list, which included Minister for the Marine Hugh Coveney and his very stylish wife Pauline, Pat and Colette Dineen, Denis and Anne Murphy, Peter and Margaret Barry, Ted and Gretchen Crosbie, Eddie and Cintra Nolan, Eddie and Sheila Murphy and Barry and Eimer Galvin.

Diana McWilliam of the famous sail making family told me she thought Ford Cork Week was much better than Cowes less primness and Pimms, more easy going atmosphere and good humoured competition.

Social highlights of the week were the Mount Gay rum party fasting becoming a tradition at regattas and the Tug of War, which was won for the second year in succession by the muscular team of Victor Shine, Eamon O'Neill, Peter Collins, Brendan O'Donoghue, Aidan McSweeney and Michael Collins.

Seen enjoying the jolly sociability of the tented village were competitors John Bourke, the commodore of the Royal Ocean Racing Club Richard Burrows, MD of Irish Distillers veteran sailor Denis Doyle, skipper of Moonduster and by far the most popular competitor in the regatta barrister John O'Donnell, Corkman Clayton Love Dublin man Paddy O'Brien, who had the enviable task of skippering Sorcery, one of the most impressive boats in the regatta, and Jerry Twomey of the Paddy Garibaldi chain.

At the start of the week several people referred to Ted Heath's famous description of yachting as "standing under a shower tearing up £5 notes". Towards the end of the week, the same quote had changed to "standing under a cold shower tearing up £50 notes". All spoken men who were thoroughly themselves on boats with such as Desperado, Hobo, Obsession, Zeal, Still Desperate and Bankrupt.