Chieftain's 2007 Fastnet win

Skipper and owner Ger O'Rourke talks to thedailysail about his greatest sailing achievement to date

While the Rolex Fastnet Race has a reputation for being a heavy weather race, in fact this is not really the case. More often than not it is a light to modate weather race, held as it is biennially in the height of the UK summer, and just occasionally - the last time being 1979 - does it see some serious breeze as it has this year. It is perhaps for this reason - that the big breeze races are the ones that are remembered - why the race has earned itself such a tough reputation.

Apart from the weather another oddity of this year's race was its winner. Typically in offshore races such as this, whether the winner under IRC is a big boat or a small boat is dictated by if the weather is better at the start or end of the race. This is why this year's mid-to upper fleet winner, Limerick-based property developer Ger O'Rourke's Cookson 50, Chieftain, is perhaps unusual.



On this occasion the key weather moment was coinciding the arrival at the Fastnet Rock with that of the centre of 'the depression' ie: being able to sail across to the Rock in favourable breeze and then also being able to make the return passage from the Rock also in favourable breeze, as the wind veered.

While the VO60 Venom hit this shift perfectly, resulting in a fifth place for Andreas Hanakamp's Russian Volvo team, O'Rourke says that they arrived shortly after. Venom arrived at the Fastnet Rock at 00:53 on Tuesday morning, Chieftain rounded at 1:51 with the Aussie Reichel-Pugh 60 footer Loki in between them (rounding at 01:27).

O'Rourke says that prior to the start their navigator/tactician, multiple X-99 World Champion Jochem Visser had predicted this to be the key moment of the race and thus it would be a 50-60 footer's race: "Jochem downloaded some GRIB files and we were looking at the weather forecast and it suited us that the fact that the weather was changing 180 degrees once we got to the Rock - it suited our sized boat as opposed to the larger boats in that when we got to the Rock we were running back home. So we made a fairly good speed from the Fastnet Rock to the Scillies - I think we did it in something like 10 hours which is averaging around 19 knots which is good going for a 50 footer... Whereas some of the 100ft maxis and the 60s ahead of us were not necessary running, they were fetching because the wind was only clocking around at that stage. So they may have been doing average speeds of 9-10 knots whereas we were doing 20 and that made the difference."

While Venom rounded the Fastnet Rock in the centre of the depression, Chieftain was headed as they approached the Rock from the southwest. For the last 8 miles they were upwind. "At that stage the wind was dying just prior to the shift and when we got to the Rock we managed to make it in about 10-15 knots of breeze, heading us. Going around we put up our R7 spinnaker and we held it all the way," says O'Rourke. Impressively they rounded the Rock within 15-30 minutes of what Visser's routing software had predicted prior to the start.

Coming back from the Rock the breeze slowly built from around 15 knots to, at one stage, 35, but the worst part was the sea following the dramatic wind shift. "You had rogue waves coming in from the side and it was more confused than I’ve ever sailed in before," says O'Rourke. "It was very difficult to control the boat. You had a 15 degree error margin - with the rogue waves coming in from the side pushing you off that 15 degrees, we had a few close wipe-outs. So we were having to change drivers every half an hour religiously, changing the trimmers for concentration, changing one person at a time during watch changes so that they’d familiarise themselves with the sync of the boat and keep the concentration levels up. We pushed as hard as we could."

While some reports came in of 40 knots wind on the first night of the race, O'Rourke says they saw no more than 25 that night and returning from the Rock were the worst conditions they experienced during the race. "We had a double reefed main, we had gone through the procedure. We have a fully experienced offshore crew, they have done a lot of miles, so we were prepared for that type of weather conditions. But it crossed my mind that first night - 'what the hell am I doing here? Do I need this?' But we persevered and it paid off."



O'Rourke admits it was pretty grim on board. He and another crewman were seasick, but they soldiered on. "It was mighty wet. Two of us had dry suits and we weren’t doing too bad. We invested in dry suits in New York before we did the transat. So it was wet - very wet."

Now 46, O'Rourke has been sailing for the last 20 years and got into racing about 15 years ago, sailing out of the Western Yacht Club in Kilrush. Prior to his present Cookson 50 canting keeler, he had a Beneteau 40.7 in which he competed in the 2005 Commodores' Cup and won his class in the Round Ireland Race, and before that a 38ft Beneteau. His old 40.7, Philosophy, is still competing in the Rolex Fastnet Race.

"I got crewing on boats and then I said to myself ‘I’ve got to learn more about this sport, it is really good, so I went back to dinghies and started taking out Lasers and learning the hard way," says O'Rourke of his entry into the racing world. "I did my navigation and all the radio courses and everything and have had a great few years. It is great fun, a great sport."

Chieftain was the fifth Cookson 50 to be built and was significantly different from the first four boats in having a canting keel and a single daggerboard forward, rather than the original arrangement of a canting keel with a trim tab and no daggerboard.

"I was the first one to modify it by putting in a single canard up the front, but it has turned out to be so successful with my modification that they are now putting it as standard on all the Cooksons," says O'Rourke. "I don’t think there are any Cookson 50s out there at the moment without the canard." The trim tab went in the process. "I have taken that off," he continues. "I thought it was a bad idea in the first place and the rest of the fleet have done the same because of that. There are about 14 or 15 Cookson 50s now, mostly in the southern hemisphere, some in Italy and one in the US. I think there are a few interested English people looking at them."

O'Rourke took delivery of Chieftain from Cooksons in August 2005 and has maintained an impressively active racing program since. In 2005 their first regatta was Hamilton Island when they came fifth, fresh out of the box. They then did the Rolex Sydney-Hobart winning their class. The boat was then shipped back to Europe and during 2006 they sailed in a majority of the RORC's offshore races, winning most of them. "We won our class in Round Ireland," O'Rourke continues. "We won Round Britain and Ireland and we got Boat of the Year last year in Ireland. We did the Middle Sea Race but it was a drifter, so we were in the middle of that fleet. Then I decided to go over to do Key West and that was a bit of a drifter - it didn’t really suit us and we came in the middle of class SZ, with some of the TP 52s beating us. After that we did Antigua Race Week. We won our class there and beat ABN AMRO One [on handicap] - the only time she’d been beaten all year. Then we went up to do the Transat from NY to Hamburg." In the HSH Nordbank blue transatlantic race between Newport, over the top of the UK to Hamburg, they came home second on the water, second in class and won under IRM.

So what is his O'Rourke's secret? Is it keeping a regular crew together? Sailng with him on board Chieftain were Jochen Visser, boat captain Edwin O'Connor, his daughter Dee O'Rourke, Kiwis Matt Stuart and Ryan Hueston and NZ-based Irishman Cam Marshall, then Kevin Johnson, Tom Whelan, Donie Hegharty and two Brits Tom Whitburn and Rob Gullan.

"It is very difficult to keep the very same team together," admits O'Rourke. "I try to maintain a team that’s as Corinthian as much as possible from the point of view of getting very good sailors, not so much my best friends, but the best team you can get together as you can. And we have a panel of about 30 lads built up, but because it is a fairly exciting boat and it has a good reputation it is fairly easy to get good crew. I have always managed to get the right people together - that’s the trick to getting good results."

Aside from Visser one of the stars of the Rolex Fastnet Race on board was Cam Marshall ('Volvo Cam' as he is known on board). "He was outstanding. He went up the rig during the race to change a halyard that broke in 30 knots of breeze going across the Celtic Sea. That was the fractional port halyard which broke. We lost it overboard, so we had to do bear headed changes."

O'Rourke says that they had done their calculations and if they had to do bearheaded changes for the rest of the race it might be the difference between their winning or losing against Rambler. So Volvo Cam was sent aloft to run a new halyard. "We sent him up and no problem..." says O'Rourke. "He ran up and ran down. He’s a good lad, we were lucky to get him and I’d have him on board any time."

Marshall was sailing on board for the first time as another significant feature of Chieftain's Fastnet race was that she very very nearly didn't make the start line due to the RORC restricting entries to a maximum of 300.

O'Rourke explains what happened: "I tend not to enter races until I have finished the previous race, on the basis that, first of all, I want to make sure I still have a rig up and sails and the ability to do it because of breakages. So I left the entry to the Fastnet Race until I got in from the Transat which was six weeks prior to the Fastnet Race and at that stage it was full up!" At this point they were around 40th on the waiting list. Fortunately as the race approached and some boats fell by the wayside and some others lost patience and withdrew from the waiting list so THE DAY BEFORE the start O'Rourke was informed by the RORC that Chieftain could compete.

As a result there was a frantic scrabble to find crew: "I had a stand-by crew, but you can imagine it is difficult to get people who are Corinthian to get time off work on a stand-by basis and stand them up or stand them down. So I literally picked up some lads from around the boatyard and Cam was one of them."

Another unique part of Chieftain's race is that around the time they passed the Lizard on the way out they lost the use of their GPS. "So we had to run on DR all the way from the Lizard on paper charts. Not quite a sextant as we had a handheld GPS, but when you get used to Deckman… We were taking fixes every two hours. We didn’t get any forecasts once it was down. That was interesting. Fortunately it was a straight line race out to the Rock and back again."

Passing the Scillies one of the crew managed to get some GSM coverage and they got the news they were in the hunt for the handicap win against Rambler. "We knew we were doing good and we knew we were in the running which was enough to keep us focussed and to keep trimming. We pushed hard to make all the tidal gates. We just about made them. We pushed hard to make all the weather changes and we were lucky enough with those, so lucky the race went our way. It could have just as easily have gone another way."

The Rolex Fastnet Race win concludes a successful two year campaign by Chieftain and O'Rourke says he will now stop and take stock. "I am going to put the boat up on the hard. I don’t have any program right now," he says. "I suppose to campaign the boat for the last two years and do what I’ve done and with the Sydney Hobart class win, fourth overall, then to finish with the Fastnet it’s been a fantastic two years."

Now that he has proved himself in such an emphatic way, O'Rourke says he would ideally like to get a bigger boat, perhaps a 65 footer and continue on a similar program but he would need a sponsor to make this happen. "So I am available! We can give value for sponsorship. It is expensive to run these things even with a Corinthian crew. If we just cover the crew costs and wear and tear on sails I think we can give value from a sponsorship point of view. I am discussing with a few sponsors at the moment the possibility of branding Chieftain and maybe if I did that subject to that we’d agree a program of races and we’d campaign the Rolex races as much as possible, campaign the RORC races and whatever else came up but mostly ocean races."

Chieftain is the first Irish boat to have won the Rolex Fastnet Race, since the very first Irish boat to win the race 20 years ago - Stephen Fein's Full Pelt Irish Independent. (Stephen Fein tells us: We did not win the cup because we were sponsored but we won the race!)