Sail Around Ireland: Best Event of the Year?

So the whitewater season has kicked off with an almighty bang with Cranafest, up in deepest darkest Donegal! What makes this event great is that it caters for everybody, regardless of experience or ability. With beginner, intermediate and advanced competitions in boaterX, freestyle and slalom and a huge variety of coaching sessions from some of the best instructors in the country, everybody is guaranteed to have a brilliant weekend. This event has been going for a few years now and has been growing and growing, with the organisers always trying to go one better than the previous year. last year they introduced a raft race (which was a massive success; it wasn't until this year's event that some egos recovered from it!) and this year it was the Wavesport moonlight challenge, a night time time trial over the main drop on the river, the Claw.

This picture of Barry Loughnane sums up the weekend pretty well; good water levels, great crowds, nice weather and a great section of river...all in all a pretty epic weekend. Photo by Tom O'Donoghue.

The night time trial was brilliant craic. It was restricted to competitors in the expert boaterX but that was still 120 people, so it still took a few hours to run through everyone! There was a brilliant atmosphere at it, with everyone out having the craic and supporting each other. It was probably the shortest race we've ever had, times were around 25 seconds so every bit of the race was crucial, any kind of a stall on the start ramp or at the bottom of the claw and you would be finished! Lots and lots of big names came through and it was impossible to call who was ahead however right at the end Neil Slevin and Cian McNally hit lines that put everyone elses to shame and made everyone look pedestrian in comparison! In the end Cian won, with Shane Little in 2nd and Neil in 3rd. I felt like I had a pretty good run so I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the results!

I won't go into details about the rest of the weekend, but basically UL brought a caravan and 13 people, drove for 6 hours, went for pints, crashed at a GAA pitch, competed in freestyle, slalom, the Dagger Dash and Wavesport timetrial, partied hard, raced in various boaterXs, went to a prize giving, collected a bunch of medals and drove 6 hours home. And then slept for about a week!

The lads had some great results, Jack won the mens sport freestyle and Jemma won the womens; and Sam came 2nd in the intermediate boaterX. Pretty respectable for their first kayaking event! I came 2nd in Div 1 slalom which I was very surprised at, and 2nd in the expert boaterX which is pretty sweet! As is always the case with boaterX luck played a pretty big part all day but hey, I'm not going to complain when it goes my way!