Another Sunday, another great turnout for the HYC Dinghy Frostbites. Sun, a gentle southerly breeze and occasionally clear skies welcomed 28 boats to the race course, as race officer Neil Murphy sent the fleets on 2 races, around a windward leeward course. The southerly breeze brought plenty of shifts, gusts, and lulls, while a flooding tide encouraged most sailors right towards the shore up the beats to get out of the tide. The flooding tide also kept all the boats back from the starting line, and all starts got away cleanly. Three Sundays and six races remain in this series, before the season-closing Round the Island Race on Saturday 11th March.

The ILCA 7s saw Dan O’Connell and Rory Lynch return after their absence the previous week, and both came back with a bang with a win each. Conor Murphy rounded out the top spots of the day, taking whatever podium places left from the other two. Dan, taking his first win of the series in the second race of the day, now leads the series overall with 24 points. Ronan Wallace, Rory Lynch, Conor Murphy and Oisin Hughes fill out the rest of the top 5 for the series. With only 4 points separating 2nd to 5th, and one more discard to come, expect plenty of position changes over the next few weeks.

Marco Sorgassi returned to the top of the ILCA 6s with 2 clean wins, sailing fast and rubbing shoulders with the ILCA 7s most of the way around the course. Fiachra Farrelly and Darragh Peelo swapped 2nd and 3rd in each race to fill out the rest of the podium places. Marco leads the series with an impressive 9 points after 12 races. Only 1 point separates Fiachra Farrelly and Darragh Peelo so the fight for 2nd overall will be closely fought over the coming weeks.

The ILCA 4s had two new race winners today in MYC’s Glenda Gallagher and HYC’s Des Turvey. MYC’s Viktor Samoilovs continues to rack up some great results, and clinched the remaining podium places for the day’s racing. There was even a photo finish required for the second race of the day, as Viktor and Des crossed the line together after 2 complete laps of the windward leeward course. With the race committee ultimately unable to separate the two, both were awarded 2.5 points for the race. Aisling Kelly leads the series overall, but Viktor is only 0.5 points behind in 2nd and Riaghan Boardman is only another 3.5 points behind him in turn.
The PY fleet and their growing numbers earned them their own start again this week. Another impressive display from Alan Blay in his GP14 saw him take two 1sts, firmly unseating Daragh Sheridan’s long streak of winning at least one race each weekend in his RS Aero. Conor Twohig and Matthew Cotter’s GP14 swapped 2nd and 3rd with Daragh Sheridan’s RS Aero, with nail-biting results; with separation of 2 seconds and 4 seconds on corrected time in each race.

Three more weekends, six more races, and if the weather holds up there’s no reason to not continue the brilliant quality of racing achieved this weekend.

Full results from this weekend are available here.

---Report by Conor Murphy