Joy for Irish as Cracklin' Rosie flowers in Scotland

A STRONG Irish performance in a fleet of 235 boats at the Scottish Rover Series on Loch Fyne this week has secured three class CHS wins for Irish east coast crews, including wins in the big boat and sportsboat classes.

Howth skipper Roy Dickson, who came within three quarters of a point margin of Scottish victory last year, completed some unfinished business by taking overall honours in class zero, but only after a tie-break decision.

Renowned for her medium and heavy weather abilities, the Cracklin' Rosie crew surprised even themselves with the overall win, achieved in what was a predominantly light-air regatta. On Sunday's inshore race, the Howth boat won the four-hour race by a massive 22 minutes on corrected time.

Finishing on equal points with a Dubois 37 - Victric 4 (Tony De Mulder) - the result should have been broken after the results of the offshore race in Victric's favour, but as De Mulder and Dickson had competed in different offshore races, the honours were decided instead on the result of the last race, won by just four seconds by the north Dublin crew.

Third overall was Dun Laoghaire's Surfin Shoes (Colm Barrington). Despite a knee injury that prevented Dickson from helming (he performed tactics instead), he said yesterday that he intended to be back on the wheel for the summer's big events.

Dickson's club-mate. Richard Burrows teamed up with Joe English to produce a significant 1720 win from a fleet of 24 sportsboats, while in class three Tommy Murphy's X372 produced three wins in a six-race event in CHS class four.

Back in Dublin, and as part of their build-up to the Dragon Gold Cup to be staged off Dun Laoghaire in six weeks' time, Robin Hennessy and Des Cummins, who sailed Rascal Rat to victory at last weekend's Carlsberg Baily Bowl, are hoping to repeat their performance at the class ATS East coast championship tomorrow, although Rascal Rat's third crew member, sailmaker Philip Watson, will be replaced by Anthony Shanks for the three-day regatta at the Royal Irish YC.

From a race organisation point of view, the six-race series will be a dry run for Tony O'Gorman's Gold Cup race office team and as such it is his intention to break from the traditional committee boat start and use a signal vessel 200 feet to weather off the line for the starting procedure.

On the south coast, more than a quarter of the 80 entries received for the second Cork Dry Gin Sovereign's Cup at Kinsale YC from June 23rd to 27th are from outside the Cork area and now include entries from England, Northern Ireland and Wales. The keelboat handicap competition will provide CHS and ECHO racing but it will also provide one-design racing for the inaugural 1720 national championships, with an anticipated 40-boat fleet.