We met the owner of Coolmore, who looked very much the Master of the Hounds, which, it turned out, he was. He gave us the key to the place Ron wanted to show me, and we drove along a rutted, very muddy road beside the river until we came to a small clearing, where we parked the car. We walked a few yards and came to a lovely old stone cottage right on the banks of the river at a bend called Drake’s Pool, so named because Sir Francis Drake is supposed to have eluded the Spanish by hiding there. Because of the double bend in the river they thought it was petering out and went back to search for him in Cork Harbor. The Owenboy River has scoured out a deep pool there, and it is a perfect yacht anchorage. There was an empty mooring directly in front of the cottage. We looked inside: a large living room, a large bedroom, a small bedroom, a kitchen, and a bath. The place had been newly plumbed and wired for electricity. I felt a bit giddy; things had begun to move very fast. I looked again at the mooring as we left. It came with the cottage, Ron said.
At the boatyard we encountered the skepticism from its managing director, Barry Burke, that I had half expected from Ron. He wasn’t sure that the boat was suitable for a transatlantic passage. Ron said that he’d crossed the Tasman Sea in a similar-size boat. I pointed out that the OSTAR in ’72 had been done by David Blagden in a nineteen-foot Hunter and asked if he didn’t think his boat would be as strong as a Hunter 19. Ron said he’d give the boat more of a bashing in the 625-mile Fastnet Race than I’d give it in a transatlantic. We talked about making changes to the standard design. Burke was reluctant to slow his production line down with modifications to a standard boat. Pull it off the line, said Ron, and put a couple of men on it. Burke wasn’t sure. He asked when I would want the boat. Easter, I said. Impossible, he replied. He’d already sold nine boats. The earliest delivery date would be July 1. I did some quick mental calculations. The OSTAR rules required a five-hundred-mile qualifying single-handed cruise no later than three months before the race. I figured that if the boat were ready on July 1 I could just about get her and myself ready for a qualifying cruise before the end of the summer, if I sailed on as many other boats as I could in the spring and early summer. We made a list of the possible modifications to the boat, and Barry promised to let me have an estimate for them. I had hoped that he might agree to some discount, since the boat would undoubtedly receive a lot of attention if it were entered in the OSTAR, and I hoped to do a book about the experience; that would give it even more publicity. Barry didn’t seem inclined to give a discount. We left it at that, and I invited Ron to have dinner with me, where we continued our discussion of the yacht and the race. “What would you change about the boat if you were not building to the Rule?” I asked. (The International Offshore Rule, a rating system so complex that it is understood only by computers, which, in turn, explain it to yacht designers and yachting magazines, which publish incomprehensible articles about it.)
Ron looked thoughtful. “Maybe raise the freeboard a little,” he said. The freeboard is the amount of hull between the deck and the waterline, and, so my reading had told me, was a principal factor in seaworthiness.
“Suppose,” I said, “we put a two-inch slice of teak between the hull and the deck? That would raise the freeboard and also give me another two inches of headroom in the cabin.” We were talking about how to change the yacht slightly to make it a fast cruiser instead of a flat-out racing boat. We had already talked about sawing the racing-type cockpit out of the glass-fiber molded deck and building a more conventional cruising cockpit with seats and lockers.
“I think that’s a rather intelligent solution,” he replied. I glowed at the thought of having contributed an original idea. We talked about what might be squeezed into the interior. Southcoast had hired a Swedish designer to do the interior, and I was considering doing my own layout with Ron’s help, since my requirements were different from the man who might race the boat on weekends, then take an occasional family cruise. I wanted no bunks forward in the boat. I wanted a large, empty forepeak for sail stowage and nothing else. It seemed to me that all the other boats I had seen with bunks forward always had the forepeak filled with wet sails anyway, so why have bunks?
Our evening was drawing to a close, and over coffee we had returned to the subject of a novice attempting to learn enough in a short time to sail the race successfully. I outlined what I thought I had to do in the remaining time. Up until now everything had been a big maybe, but I had been encouraged by my practically daylong talk with Ron. Finally, I said, “I think I can do it.” Ron said, “I think you can do it, too. I think it’s an exciting project, and I’d like to be involved in it.”
I think at that moment the basic decision was made.
Back at Lough Cutra there was a letter waiting from the OSTAR race committee. They had decided to accept Ewan Southby-Tailyour’s Hurley 24 entry because of his performance in the Round Britain Race but would accept no other Hurley 24s. Had the boat been of that size but of a more experimental nature, they might have considered it more favorably. I didn’t understand that last part, but anyway, my mind was now galloping off on another tack and the Shamrock had replaced the Hurley in my thinking.
Now I began, with no credentials whatever, to become a yacht designer, at least on the inside of the yacht. I pored over the layouts of dozens of other yachts, picking the features I liked best. First of all, since I didn’t want berths in the forecabin, that could be smaller and the saloon and toilet areas correspondingly larger. Then I crammed into the space available every feature I had heard about, read about, or imagined, and, to my astonishment, it all seemed to fit. A letter arrived from Barry Burke, with an estimate for fitting a skeg, rebuilding the cockpit, raising the decks with my teak sandwich idea, and building a custom interior to my specifications. It came to £1,600 above the cost of the standard boat. This was daunting, but maybe it could be lowered a bit by negotiation.
I had a telephone conversation with John McWilliam, the Crosshaven sailmaker who had clothed Golden Apple and Golden Shamrock. He had been out of town during my visit to Cork, but he had since talked with Ron and was enthusiastic about the project. We talked about a possible sail plan, and he sent an estimate. Another £1,600 or so was added to the budget.
About this time I felt enough committed to the project to begin to let my friends in Galway know what I was thinking. A friend from Dublin came down to Lough Cutra for the weekend, and I invited Harry McMahon and his wife to join us for dinner. At some point during the evening I mentioned, as casually as possible, that I was thinking of buying a Ron Holland half-tonner. The last boat I had mentioned to Harry had been the Hurley, and I hadn’t mentioned any plans for it beyond some coastal cruising. “What would you do with a half-tonner in Galway?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. “I’m thinking of sailing it in the Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race,” I said. Harry looked stunned; his wife burst out laughing. That was to be fairly typical of the reactions of people who knew me as a Mirror helmsman in Galway. I would just have to get used to it.
In early December I went back to see Ron in Cork. He looked at my sketch of the interior and explained, as patiently as he could, that this would not fit, because the sides of the boat did not go straight down but curved inward. On a cruising boat with fuller “sections” it might be possible, but not on a hull designed for racing. Together we drew up a compromise of what might be possible. He did, however, agree with my idea of pushing the saloon bulkhead (wall) forward by making the forecabin smaller. Ron pulled out the drawings of a three-quarter-tonner he had designed for production in glass fiber, called the Quest 32. The company that was to manufacture it had gone under. We all agreed that it was a great pity that it would not now be built. Ron was at a stage of his career when he needed several boats in series production, just about the only way a yacht designer can make any real money.