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My Round Ireland trip a real ballast:LANDLUBBERS, turn right on Wicklow Bay, go down the East coast and around Ireland clockwise until, four, five, six or seven days later you reach the same spot. You will then have completed the Round Ireland race, which starts tomorrow.

Having been cajoled into doing it the 1990s, we set sail on board a 90-foot maxi called “Bridgestone”, aka “Longobarda”. A kind man called Mike Slade, who owned the boat and apparently much, much more, was trying to break the race record. Longobarda nearly did but was beaten that year by “Big Ears”. The crew saw nothing funny about losing to Noddy’s friend.

Never having been on a racing yacht, the job of ballast was the obvious one.

In a time before the boats pumped water to either side, the heaviest and most useless crew could always kill time out of harm’s way at the front, legs dangling over the side for the four-hour shift.

It was there hoping to see a basking shark I met Flannery, a professional Kiwi crew hand. Unable to winch fast enough or lift a wet sail from below through the hatch (which Flannery did with élan, spinning it like Peter Stringer), or know where the wind was or what the tide was doing or what direction we were going in or what leeward was or what a halyard did, Flannery took pity. The only skill acquired throughout the entire 700 miles was how to fall asleep holding the rail in showers of sea spray and rain.

Some years before, Flannery was taking Slade’s other yacht from above the horn of Africa to the Caribbean because that’s what you do. They were a skeleton crew of maybe six, five men and a woman.

Off the coast of Somalia they started to hear plops in the water behind. The plops got closer and closer until a power boat came in view. It was full of pirates, firing mortars at them. They couldn’t out run it. Frantically sending out the SOS, they hid the woman up in a locker in the nose of the boat and kept sailing.

The pirates inevitably caught up but the crew, hoping to buy time, spun the much bigger yacht pretending the wind was difficult. But the pirates became tetchy and one raised a hand gun and pointed it towards the boat. They were thinking: men overboard, the woman, God knows.

As they were about to board the yacht, Flannery throws his eyes to heaven, imagining “a f**king Somali warlord riding around in a maxi”, a Canadian frigate actually appeared on the horizon. The pirates took flight and the crew praised the might of military hardware.

We said to them over the radio, “Why didn’t you blow them out of the f**king water?” Flannery recalled. The navy said they weren’t fired upon and they were not allowed to randomly blow up the boats of locals. They added they couldn’t escort the yacht out of danger.

Mark Pollack won’t have the comfort of salty dog tales this week. He is in a two-man boat. A former international rower from Belfast, Mark lost his sight when his retinas detached aged just 22. He’s racing the course for the first time.

Given he has survived sub-zero temperatures in Antarctica, racing to the South Pole; has suffered the scorching heat of the Gobi Desert, completing six marathons in one week and returning from “The Race of No Return”; given he has completed races on the frozen Arctic Ocean, through the desert of the African Rift Valley and at altitude in the Himalayas on Everest, this is a cruise.

But you know? You never can tell.

Cowed Hernandez shows bull his ass on way out

A PICTURE came in to the office on the wire a few weeks ago, which had us all amused. It was not printed in this family newspaper.

A bull’s horn had penetrated a Spanish matador’s chin and had come up through his tongue and out his mouth. Both of the matador’s feet were ghoulishly off the ground.

Yeah, yeah, yeah terrible but he had been lancing the bull with spears and was about to stab it in the neck. What comes around goes around, we say.

No such career-threatening injury for Christian “yellow streak” Hernandez, whose cowardly spirit inside the ring was bettered only by his boning honesty outside of it. The Mexican was arrested after a scheduled fight in Mexico, which didn’t happen.

Hernandez made a spin with his red cape at the charging bull then ran across the ring and leapt head first over a wall to safety, dropping his cape as he ran. They cleverly prosecuted the 22-year-old under breach of contract and he was forced to pay a fine.

“There are some things you must be aware of about yourself,” he said. “I didn’t have the ability. I didn’t have the balls. This is not my thing.”

But the officials must surely go up in the gallery of grotesques with those who ran the Irish banks and those – who, in honesty, may take the defence that they are very dumb – that have been poisoning our golden eagles and red kites.

Not unlike Saddam Hussein, when he posed for the cameras before his own macabre end with a terrified little boy, who he patted on the head to show the world he was just an ageing old grandfatherly type in a general’s uniform and not a deadbeat tyrant, they ushered jumpy Hernandez back into the ring a few days later.

What a jape that was. The ex-matador put his hands over his head and pointed towards the sky before making a second bowel-loosening exit.

There is only one sport in the world, professional boxing, where you can make a come back after chickening out like that.

Beckett clean bowls Joyce on cricket 

THE WALKING cane and white-suited thespians were out on Wednesday for Bloomsday, turning Sandycove into a fashion time warp to the back drop of the Forty Foot bathing place. That must surely be “The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”

On Thursday, the Australian cricket team played against Ireland in Clontarf’s ground in Castle Avenue. Joyce would have approved.

Indeed, had he been around he might have attended. Joyce was a cricket man, or, at least he references the sport in his work.

“The all white poors guardiant, pulpably of ball tossic stummung . . . ” he said in Finnegans Wake, a book guaranteed to last you longer than an Ashes Series.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manhe sounded less like Paul Gascoigne on Newcastle Brown ale. As a student in Clongowes Wood, he would have often played the game.

“The air was very silent and you could hear the cricket bats but more slowly than before: pick, pock,” said the lad artist.

The real measure of cricket’s literary heft is in how many heavyweight writers borrow from the game. It is said by those who have read Finnegans Wake that in a tour de force passage, Joyce actually smuggles the altered names of 31 cricketing stars into the text.

In this neck of the woods, though, you are either a Joyce man or a Beckett man. The Beckett family home, Cooldrinagh, in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house, complete with tennis court. Beckett often went walking with his father Samuel to nearby Leopardstown Racecourse and was also an active member of the Carrickmines Golf Club, where he is splendidly pictured in the club’s centenary book.

A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler. He also played for Trinity and was involved in two first-class games against Northamptonshire.

In that respect the Beckett camp, as you must always do in sport, wins. Happy Bloomsday!

England hardly on the ball over Jabulani

AS ONE who can think of several reasons for not loving establishment England, their football isn’t one of them. Come on England. Long live the Premier League.

But Fabio Capello and company are not really helping themselves in this World Cup, where they are already messaging that this could become a desperate and hapless voyage in South Africa.

In English football, naturally the best in the world, barely one third of the players who started in the Premier League last season were actually English, making it a handy little domicile for the world’s best players but not a great breeding ground for local lads.

As well as that the Premier League has a contract with sports goods company Nike, while the England national side are tied in to Umbro.

So why was Liverpool’s Jamie Carragher whinging last week?

Well because the ball was not working the way the England players expected it to. No complaints from the Germans, naturally, as the World Cup ball is made by Adidas, to whom they are commercially tied.

They say big tournaments are often won on attention to detail. In England they book their hotel and check everything from training grounds to food quality a year in advance but the match ball is only tried out when the players get together after their club season is done. Odd.

Harvey's not averse to penning Wimbledon odes

YOU WILL not know Matt Harvey. He is the official Poet in Residence for the 2010 Wimbledon Championships. How about that, an official poet?

Harvey has already written his first poem called The Grandest of Slams. The Performance Poet will read every day of the competition to spectators.

In his first poem, Harvey waxes: “Wimbledon, Where tough tennis cookies have cracked and then crumbled in, Top seeds have stumbled, have tumbled, been humbled in Wimbledon, Where home-grown heroes’ hopes have swelled up and then dwindled in Wimbledon.”