Rohan earns top award for blazing trail to show Blondie's true colours
Saturday November 07 2009
Eamonn Rohan of Crosshaven is the Irish Independent/Afloat.ie 'Sailor of the Month' for October. His prototype King 40 Blondie IV has taken the Class 1 championship in the Royal Cork's Autumn League by 0.5 points, after the most closely fought end-of-season series staged by the world's senior sailing club.
It is Rohan's perseverance and sailing management skills which are being celebrated this weekend. When the very new Blondie IV made her debut over two years ago, she was so fresh out of the box -- being the prototype of the latest Mark Mills 40ft design -- that teething problems were inevitable.
The concept was brilliant and the performance potential was always there. But getting all the bells and whistles to ring on time and in tune with a boat being built in early series production in Argentina posed mighty problems.
Then too, there's the credibility factor -- the challenge of assembling and keeping a crew of all the necessary talents while bringing the boat to full sea-going and racing potential. Thus in a sense, although Blondie looked like a winner from the start, equally she has always looked a work in progress rather than a complete show on the road.
Prosper
As the old frontier saying would have it, pioneers get shot so that settlers can prosper. By the end of 2008, the King 40 marque was shaping up so well that she was named 'Boat of the Year' for 2009.
The King 40 has had so many wins that she is shaping up to be a defining boat for our times. So successful is the design (they've won everywhere in the last 10 months) that they've had to rationalise the building to Summit Yachts in Florida, so now she has become the Summit 40, the big sister of the newer Mark Mills design which was already being built in the Sunshine State.
Thus a genuine King 40 will have rare value, and Blondie IV will be the queen of them all. Even as the Crosshaven win was being clinched last weekend, across in the Chesapeake at Annapolis, White Heat, another first-mould King 40, won the Class 3 race in the US-IRC East Coast championship.
So we honour Eamonn Rohan, both as the new champion and as the man who was prepared to put his head above the parapet for the new 40-footer.
Meanwhile, in the final overnight off-shore race of the Student Yachting Worlds at Marseilles, Cork IT has finished fifth. Limerick finished 10th overall. In the South Atlantic, Richie Fearon has skippered Cork Ireland up to second in the Clipper Round the World Race, nine miles behind the leader with 1,700 miles to go.
- WM Nixon
Irish Independent
