Sail Around Ireland: Intervarsites 2015...Awesome Weekend in Galway!!

So it's been a few weeks since the event, but I owed my FYP a bit of time in leu after not really being able to concentrate on anything college related for the week coming up to varsities! Most people reading this probably know the story, but anyway, from the ground up; the intervarsities is the annual event where the fifteen or so college kayak clubs in the country come together for a weekend of partying, having the craic and competing to see who brings home the coveted big silver trophy! ULKC went into this years competition having won the last five years in a row, which makes it sound like we're in a league of our own in terms of college clubs when really there is a whole lot more to it than that! Each year we have won the competition by a hair's breadth; it always comes down to a couple of points in the end, and thankfully for the last few years we have just done enough to scrape the title. A few years ago the competition even came down to the nominal points which were going for fancy dress at the time! There has always been several colleges just behind us in the final ranking and this year was no different, coming up to the big weekend it was wide open!

This year's competition was hosted by NUIG/GMITG and they started the planning process with big ideas about how they were going to make the competition more inclusive, increase participation by novice paddlers and make the whole thing more fun and more spectator friendly. These ideas were awesome, including holding the freestyle finals at night in the middle of a massive party and adding a whole new mass participation discipline in the form of a boater-cross. It's a great ethos for the event, and some great ideas, and I really hope the whole vibe carries over to next year's event!

Unfortunatly, the downside to adding an extra event was that the whole thing kicked off at stupid o'clock on Friday morning at the bank of the Boluisce! When we got there it was freezing cold, still dark, the water still hadn't turned on and the whole thing seemed like a bit of a shite idea! Quickly though, the sun came up, the water arrived, we woke up and it all seemed a bit more bearable. Even though it was still feckin freezing! As soon as it was possible to see everyone around us the craic started, it was great to see everyone again and of course the usual abuse started flying around over who was going take the course record, and win the event overall! We had a pretty strong team for the whitewater event; myself, Andrew Regan, who needs no introduction, Emer Farrell, who's been paddling even longer than I have and Mark Scanlon, who just back from a year of studying/paddling in Austria and trip to Mexico so we were going to give it our all and try and take first in the whitewater event. Myself and Mark also went for a low water spin on the Boluisce the weekend before varsities to refresh our memories of all the lines for the race! As extra motivation, myself and Aran Kilroy, the event organiser, were competing for bragging rights coming up to Galwayfest which is great motivation to paddle that bit harder! Unfortunatly in the end we were knocked out of the top spot by a super-quick Trinity team, who's slalom backround could be recognised from a mile away by their superior technique coming across the finish line. And Aran Kilroy came in two seconds faster than me, which is rather disappointing! However I did take third place which isn't bad, and we came second in the team rankings which left us in a great place going into the other events!

Lifting the XT through the fish counter towards the end of the whitewater race. Photo by Oisin McHugh.

After the whitewater event finished up, it was straight back to the Claddagh basin for the polo competition. Polo has recently been our weakest event, and a few years ago we would have been among the weakest college teams in the country. For the last three years however we have been putting quite a bit of effort in and have been working throughout each year to try and improve the team. Slow progress can be seen; in the last few years we have gone from loosing the majority of Div 2 games in the Munster polo league, to winning most Div 2 games, to loosing the majority of Div 1 games...promising stuff! Compared to some of the other colleges, we have no experienced polo players, so to try and make up for that we were training once a week in the pool since September, focusing on getting skills and tactics down before varsities. Since Christmas, we really upped the intensity and started training three nights a week focusing on speed, ball control and teamwork. All the hard work seems to have paid off, in our very first game we won a tight, very scrappy game against DCU, who previously would have been one of the best teams in the competition. Although we won the game, we weren't happy with how messy it was and used the next two games, which we won well, to try and work on teamwork and communication and start playing the way we knew we could play. Due to the limited daylight available, the format was changed so that only the top team in each group went through to the next round and we were drawn against an extremely strong team from UCD. Although we started playing better than in the group stages it wasn't enough, they were a slightly better team, we went out and they went on to win the competition. Unfortunately we never got to replay last years drawn game against DIT! They went down to UCD in the final and we beat NUIG in the 3rd/4th place playoff. That's our best result in polo since I started college and another good one for the overall competition so we're pretty happy with it!

Everyone getting behind the team despite the cold and wind! Photo by Oisin McHugh.

After a big night out on Friday night, it was up early again on Saturday morning for the long distance race. Fuzzy heads lead to everyone being predictably slow to get registered, round up all their gear and get changed but eventually several hundred people were on the water and raring to go! After a couple of false starts, the actual starting whistle went and everyone was on the move! Recently, a whole pile of our first and second years have somehow started going out on the Shannon behind the college, paddling around in the cold and dark for a few hours a few times every week and somehow find it fun! I don't really understand it but it means that their paddling technique is great and it really helps them progress quickly when they do get out on whitewater. It also puts them in a great position going into an intervarsities long distance race! No outstanding results, they've only been paddling a few months so that will have to wait till next year, but lots of very respectable ones, which is what it takes to do well overall in Long Distance. As well as the sheer committment from the first years, Gavin Sheehan and Eoin Farrell put in a huge effort to take second place in the topo duo class, and Mark Scanlon paddled a great race, picking off the field one by one to finish in second behind me in the GP class. All in all, not an unproductive day of slogging along on flatwater! ...I realised very quickly at the start of the race that whenever I crossed someone elses wakes water started pouring in through open deck-line holes that I had forgotten to duct-tape before the race. If that happened too much I would be down and out, literally, so I had no choice only to go out in front, stay in the clean water and hope that no one would overtake me at the end. In the end it worked out better than I could have hoped, with myself and Mark losing everyone else on the final upstream battle at the end of the race. So that was another discipline down, and another good one for ULKC.

While the tunes were there, you couldn't not have an Inter-club dance-off on top of the Great-Outdoors van at the freestyle event! Photo by Oisin McHugh

After the long distance race, everyone moved back to the Claddagh basin for the freestyle competition. Unfortunatly due to the water levels not playing ball the party/freestyle event at Tuam had to be called off and the freestyle event was changed to a flatwater format where everyone got two one-minute rides and your best six moves counted. It was a really cool format which allowed you take a couple of attempts at your biggest moves instead of having to keep racking up the points with easier, less spectacular moves. That format is great for spectators and more fun to compete in too. We had another solid team for this one with myself, Andrew Regan, Eoin Farrell and Caoimhe Farrell and we were hoping for another good result, particularly since we always spend a lot of time messing around in the pool in freestyle boats. Andrew Regan, thanks to him switching from NUIG to UL, was the target of endless systemised abuse in the form of the weekend banter league and one of the challenges promised points for the college who could throw the biggest piece of fruit at Andrew during his freestyle run! ...that was great to watch, and it was even better to see him throw down a really solid freestyle run at the same time! Although I would love to have footage of the competition to compare to the score sheets, DCU put down impressive runs across the board and took a well deserved second place. DIT also had some solid runs and took first place, I wouldn't have called it that way but that's what happens in freestyle. Either way, congratulations to both of them, and we went away with third place which is not something to complain about at all!

Prize-winning watermelon en-route towards Andrew's head! Photo by Diarmuid Moloney.

After a great Mexican-themed party in the Vic on Saturday night, we woke up to find Galway covered in a pea-soup fog the next morning. This wasn't ideal for the second mass-participation event of the weekend, a boater-cross on the lower Corrib, ending pretty much in the sea. There were fears that a swimmer might be missed in the fog and float out to sea, an unlikely scenario considering the number of people on rescue but still not a chance you want to take. In the end, the organisers waited until the fog cleared a bit and then made the call to go for it, with numbers reduced to people with a solid roll. This greatly disappointed our first years who were mad to be let loose and cause some chaos so hopefully this event will be a thing again next year so that they can have their turn. In the end it gave our intermediate paddlers a chance to shine; they're the people who didn't paddle before college but started in first year and have been super-committed since then, and considering the amount of time that they have been paddling are generally pheomenally good paddlers. They're the ones who organise most of the club trips, train the beginners and generally make the club what it is, but don't generally get to paddle in whitewater and freestyle at varsities just because competition for those places is so tight. It was great to see them have an event where they could compete against people on the same level as themselves, and they did a great job of it. In the end we had five paddlers who made it through to the second round of the boater cross which is a great result!

A bit of fog wasn't enough to calm down the boater-cross competition! Photo by Oisin McHugh.

Once we had packed up after the boater cross it was time to head back to the NUIG campus for the results presentation. After the weekend of competitions, no-one knew the freestyle or boater cross results and the competition was wide open like usual; I think everyone was a little tense! In the preamble to the big announcement, I had the honour of passing on the Colm Johnson trophy to Aran Kilroy; an awesome guy who put a huge amount of work into making the varsities what it was and really pushed the fun, inclusive aspect of the whole event. There's no-one I would have preferred to hand it over to, and I'm looking forward to paddling with him, and competing against him, for a long time into the future! Laura Griffin was given the women's equivelant, another great call by the captains of all the different clubs. It was announced that next years event will be hosted by GMIT Castlebar. All the best to them, I'm sure they'll do an awesome job of it! As the results were being called out the tension was racheted a little higher when freestyle was announced, since it wasn't quite what we were expecting. We also didn't have as many top finishes in long distance as some of the other clubs so right up to the final moment it was still anyone's game. In the end, when we were called out in first place, I was surprised and delighted that all the hard work had paid off. Although some people were less than thrilled to hear that we had done it again, it really is down to lots of hard work by several generations of ULKC paddlers that we are where we are today and it's something that I'm really proud to be a part of. Hopefully the whole vibe in the club of great craic combined with putting lots of effort into improving people's paddling is something that can be maintained long into the future!