Two brothers who set out to circumnavigate Ireland in a 5m open boat in aid of the lifeboat service never anticipated that they would face such wintry weather.
"We managed to dodge five big storms, but we had 10m waves off Connemara's Slyne Head," Nathaniel Ogden (23) explained, as he and his brother, Fergus (16), prepared for the final leg of their trip.
If weather eases, the pair, from Co Kildare, hope to reach their start and finish point of Baltimore, Co Cork, this week.
They are not claiming any records, but may be one of the slowest and youngest sailing crews to complete such an adventure, as their small open deck craft can only make a speed of four to five knots.
Final stretch
They set out from Kinsale on Tuesday hoping to make it to Castletownshend before the final stretch to Baltimore.
The brothers first learned to sail as small boys in the 5.4 m Drascombe Lugger, named Lughnasa, which has been their home for the past month.
They are “still speaking to each other” after sharing a 2m square space since late June, as they were “too tired to fight at sea”.
“It’s only on land that we’d disagree!” said Nathaniel, who is a final year geology student.
“When we were weatherbound, as we were off north Mayo, we were offered accommodation by RNLI lifeboat volunteers, which was great,”he said. “But for a lot of the time we sailed, cooked and slept under a tarpaulin on board, in about 5ft of space,”he said.
Fifth year
His younger brother is still at school, and going into fifth year in September. The pair planned their voyage to raise both funds for and awareness about the work of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution( RNLI), and had expected the sort of balmy summer conditions of 2013 and 2014.
“Instead, we had incidents occurring all around us, waves breaking over the boat, and at one point we fell off the crest of waves into the trough, but we really had no time to be scared,” Nathaniel said.
“We had a hard 12-hour beat up the Clare coast, but we had a pod of 30 dolphins to keep us company.”
Shore support was provided by their family, and they also had the comfort of knowing that RNLI station volunteers were tracking them all the way round.
Pearse O'Toole, from Spiddal, Co Galway, and Ruairí Leddy, from Roscommon, are experiencing similar challenging conditions, having set out to canoe around Ireland in aid of Console, the suicide awareness charity.
They left Galway on July 24th for their north-around trip.
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