20/06/2025
We are delighted to welcome the Dragon East Coast Championship to RIYC, 20th to 22nd June. Entry is open now! There will be a Championship Dinner on Saturday 21st June, which can be booked at the time of race entry.
ENTRY & DINNER BOOKING HERE
CURRENT ENTRY LIST
OFFICIAL NOTICE BOARD
As the Club prepares to host the Dragon East Coast Championships, we can look to the pages of White Sails Crowding for accounts of previous Dragon events at the RIYC.
Tim Pearson gives a lively description of the 1994 Nationals in Chapter 11. The event was sailed in
‘breezy and demanding conditions which resulted in some damage and gear failure not to mention pretty wild sailing, and equally exciting protest room dramas. In the last race, winds gusted to 40 knots on the final downwind leg and as the boats careered towards the leeward mark, one by one the spinnakers dropped until only Aphrodite’s remained. ‘Their halyard must have jammed’, whispered someone afterwards from the safety of the RIYC wet bar. ‘Not at all’, said his friend, ‘he was just trying out his Fremantle chute.’ In the end, heavy-weather boat-handling skills made the difference in the twenty-nine boat fleet and Mick Cotter’s Aphrodite won narrowly from Gary Treacy’s new Lightning with Simon Brien from Belfast Lough third in Kin.’
Three years later the Club hosted the highly-successful Dragon Gold Cup in July 1997. Sponsorship of £50,000 was raised and a new race office, created by the renovation of the old staff flat, received the gift of a new telephone system, fax and photocopier. Eighty-one entrants from twelve countries took part in a rare week of Mediterranean temperatures though, unfortunately, very little wind. Competitors and visitors judged it ‘the best-organised Gold Cup ever’.
First conceived in 1929, the Dragon is the pre-eminent one design keelboat in the world with Class Associations in 31 countries across the globe and more than 1,300 boats registered as actively racing. Sailors range from Olympians (such as our own Eddie Kelliher at Tokyo in 1964) to enthusiastic club sailors. The Dragon is a very special class at the RIYC and we look forward to welcoming competitors from all over Ireland next week.