UK Sailmakers customers stood out at the 2019 Sovereigns Cup sailed out of Kinsale Yacht Club in southern Ireland. Of the eight classes, UK customers finished first in four.
• IRC Class 1 was taken by John Murphy and Richard Colwell’s J/109 OUTRAJEOUS.
• The Coastal Class was won by George Sisk’s XP44 WOW
• The White Sails Class 1 went to Shane Statham’s GK34 SLACK ALICE
• The 1720 one-design class was taken by Ross & Aoife McDonald’s ROPE DOCK – ATARA
The J/109 OUTRAJEOUS sailing with her symmetrical spinnaker nearly dead downwind.
The OUTRAJEOUS team held their nerve to claim victory in IRC Class One after bouncing back from a DSQ inflicted by a boat from another class. The nine-boat IRC class consisted of eight J/109s and an X34. Racing was tight; in the last race of the four-day six-race regatta the corrected times for Class 1 varied by only two minutes between first to sixth place.
OUTRAJEOUS is a new boat to the fleet and her owners worked with UK Sailmakers Ireland to optimize the boat’s downwind performance by switching her sail plan from asymmetrical spinnakers flown off of a six-foot sprit to symmetrical spinnakers flown from a traditional spinnaker pole. Look for a story about the trade-offs they considered in our next newsletter.
George Sisk’s XP44 WOW won the IRC Coastal Class. WOW won with a perfect score of three firsts. She beat a fleet of seven other boats including the XP50 FREYA. The Coastal Class is part of a growing demand of offshore sailors who desire to sail one long race per day around navigational marks that offer multiple points of sail instead of multiple windward leeward races each day.
WOW sails with Uni-Titanium Liteskin upwind sails and UK Sailmakers Matrix spinnakers. For reaching she had two deadly weapons that included a Code Zero and a Flying Jib flown from her sprit as part of a double-headsail rig. According to crew member Red Power, “The flying jib was the key on the last reach of the second race. With it we sailed higher and faster than with our zero. WOW had the only flying jib in the fleet and it was noticed.”
The XP44 WOW showing how perfectly smooth her Uni-Titanium sails are.
Third place in the Coastal Class went to Dan Buckley’s J/109 JUSTUS. When the Irish performance-based handicap system, ECHO, was used to score the class, the positions flipped and JUSTUS was first and WOW moved to third. Either way, UK Sailmakers and their customers had a good showing.
SLACK ALICE sailing upwind with her seasons-old Tape-Drive silver main and genoa.
Shane Statham and Trudy O’Leary’s GK34 SLACK ALICE claimed victory in White Sail Class 1 with four wins in the four races. Shane and his crew opted for the white sails class for competitive racing while also being friendly to the flexible crew roster throughout the four-day series.
Aoife and Ross McDonald’s ATARA successfully defended their 1720 European Championship. The class’s European Championship was incorporated within the 2019 Sovereigns Cup. The nine-boat fleet had tight racing, but ATARA manged to score two firsts and three thirds to win the series by three points over LUVLY JUBBLY.
ATARA successfully defended her 1720 European Championship title.
