Dragon Irish Nationals – Day 3 – More To Come

So Martin Byrne and his crew Adam Winkleman and Pedro Andrade aboard Jaguar, now have an almost unassailable lead here in Cultra despite putting in their worst result of the regatta – although when your worst result is a fifth and you go on to win the next race this isn’t too much of a problem.  They’ve sailed an amazing regatta and its been great to watch them putting in such a consistent performance.  We do still have two possible further races to go tomorrow, but it would take two extraordinarily bad results knock them off the top of the leaderboard and with a light forecast and an early cut off time to enable the visiting boats to pack and hoist there is very little chance that his grip on the title will be loosened.

Man of the match today was without doubt Don O’Donoghue, sailing Seabird with Gwen Chapelain and Dallas Caskey, who won race five and finished second in race six.  With the discard now in play, allowing them to drop a fifteenth, they’ve jumped back up into second overall ahead of Andrew Craig, sailing Chimera with Mark Pettitt and Brian Matthews.  Andrew also had a very good and very consistent day adding a pair of third places to his scoreline.  Not so happy with his day will have been Klaus Diederichs who finished seventh and then fifth which drops him down into fourth place overall.

Whilst Martin is sitting pretty and looking forward to claiming the top step on the poduim tomorrow’s battle for second and third place will be a good one as Donoghue, Craig and Diederichs are all still very much in contention for those remaining podium slots.

Tonight the teams will enjoy a gala dinner at the Royal North of Ireland Yacht Club and we should have some further interviews and updates for you then.