An Irishman's Diary

THE ANNUAL Shannon Boat Rally used to be front-page news. Well, it made the front of The Irish Timesat least once, anyway. That was back in 1964 when the paper carried a dramatic Page One photograph of a participating cruiser, owned by a "Mr F Livingstone Hogg", in flames at the quayside in Carrick-on-Shannon.

Its petrol-tank had blown up moments earlier. And in the picture, an Army sergeant in a skiff is attempting to rescue the boat-owner's wife, "Mrs F Livingstone Hogg": who rather than await rescue, the report adds, jumped into the river. Happily, she survived unhurt. Which is more than can be said for the vessel: named – ironically – Still Waters.

Now 50 years old, the Shannon Boat Rally no longer makes such headlines, or indeed any. It is perhaps a victim of its own success: having started in 1961 as part of a campaign to make Ireland safe for boating (a cause the move to diesel engines may also have helped).

Its founding organisation, the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland (IWAI) was itself begun as a protest against planned low bridges that would have closed stretches of Ireland’s mother river to navigation. And those were not the only obstacles facing boaters back then.

From uncontrolled weeds to a proposed canal-based sewage scheme, waterways were either neglected or abused at that time. A 1962 news column praised the “dogged and tenacious” IWAI for its work “to save the Shannon and its canals from the depredations of CIE and other careless authorities who have not yet seen their tourist value”.

The war was won in the end. Ireland’s rivers and canals now run free, more or less: with a cross-Border body ensuring they stay that way. And when more than 100 boats take part in the 50th Shannon Rally this July (details on www.iwai.ie), only the milestone will make the occasion newsworthy.

“A week-long floating village” is how the IWAI’s Evelyn Wickham describes the annual event, which as usual will have a strong water-safety theme: featuring such ever-popular entertainments as the “Man Overboard Competition”.

But to mark the special anniversary, Evelyn and her colleague Conor Meegan are also hoping this year to compile a “film and pictorial record” of the rally’s history. The early years are of special interest. And anyone with pictures, film, or memories that might help them with their inquiries is asked to contact the incident room by email to either wickhame@gmail.com or meegancon@gmail.com.

EVELYN IS too polite to say so, but if there is a bane of Shannon boat-owners’ lives these days, it may be the belated appreciation of the waterways’ tourism value, and the many neophyte boat-hirers for whom the IWAI led the way. I know, because as recently as last autumn, my family and I were those neophytes.

Our very first day on the Shannon, which involved crossing Lough Derg, happened to coincide with a Force Six wind, gusting to Force Seven. I don’t remember this being mentioned in the short safety tutorial beforehand. And although the lock-keeper at Meelick did speak of the lake being “lively” on such a day, and said we might want to check conditions with boats coming the other way, his hint somehow passed us by.

So, later, did a number of our boat’s accessories: namely two of the forward buoys: which were torn loose by Lough Derg’s angry waves and went speeding back behind us towards Portumna, which is where we should have gone. A little further out on the lough, there was a crashing noise downstairs, which turned out to be the flat-screen TV hitting the floor (it was an even flatter screen by the time we were finished with it).

But the worst thing was the loneliness in the middle of the lake where, for more than an hour, ours was the only boat to be seen.

I tell a lie. What was even worse than that was my embarrassment when trying to park a 36-foot cruiser in windy conditions: by which time, the introductory course – a few hours earlier, in a relative calm – was useless. It would be a slight exaggeration to say that my initial approaches at Dromineer and elsewhere had women and children fleeing the jetties in terror. But I think I saw panic in the eyes of boat owners whose pride-and-joys were located anywhere in my zig-zagging path.

Still, you learn fast on the river. Even as I calmed my nerves in port (or in whiskey, to be exact) later, I was already reframing those moments of shame as hard-won experience. Our second day afloat, as chance would have it, was dead calm. And the biggest adventure we had on the trip down to Killaloe – one that had my children beside themselves with excitement – was giving a tow to a lone sailor who had been stranded on lower Lough Derg, without a breeze.

He spoiled our heroic entry into Killaloe by detaching himself from us a mile north of the village, where he lived, and paddling ashore. We had been hoping to haul him into the quayside like the prize marlin in Hemingway's Old Man and The Sea(minus the part where the fish is devoured en route by sharks, leaving only a skeleton). But no matter. I slotted the hire cruiser into the only space left, first-time and without so much as a bump. So that felt heroic enough for one day.