Race Village Retrospective
Two weeks of festival and sunny weather, crowds all day and drunks all night, are finally drawing to a close. Living in the middle of the Volvo race stopover fairgrounds has had its moments, but I'm glad that it's over.
Nova fell asleep every night to the sound high-decibel music, most of which was pretty good. I didn't adapt quite so well, and have been awake past my bedtime every night for fourteen days running. I had intended to blog about the festival as it was happening, but when the time came I couldn't stand to look at it any more than I absolutely had to. I enjoyed some of it, but annoyance won out as often as not. Here's an abbreviated log of the two weeks as seen from our apartment.
Arrivals and Opening Ceremony:
I didn't get any pictures of the arrival night, but boy, was it a long one. The band played until 11pm, I had settled down to sleep by midnight, and then at 2 AM it started up again as the first boat came across the finish line. I would have almost enjoyed it except for the incredibly annoying announcer, who said at one point:
"Now, they say we're not allowed to have any music, but you [the crowd] can make music!" He encouraged them to sing "The Fields of Athenry," which didn't really take off, but y'know what? 10 minutes later, loud music piped in to accompany the Irish dancers who were there to greet the ships.
He finally piped down a bit at 4 AM, saying something about people in the neighborhood sleeping, but there were still fireworks on and off until 8 AM, when the last of the boats arrived. By early afternoon that day, all of the racing boats had been lifted out of the water by the crane and were sitting in cradles behind the Harbour Hotel.
That first night of sleep deprivation went a long way towards souring my mood about the whole event, but I still managed to enjoy some of the rest of it. The following night brought the opening ceremony, which featured more fireworks, more Irish dancing, and an old wooden fishing boat dressed up like a swan. Here's a picture of the flares. My camera wasn't up to the task of capturing the midnight event in all its fireworks, but this is the best shot I got:
Midweek lull:
Things settled down after those first two nights, and we experienced blissful quiet from 11:30 PM until mid-morning from Monday to Thursday night. Then the real trouble started -- we got new neighbors, about thirty of them, drunk and noisy from Friday night straight through the weekend. Friday and Saturday night were the worst, with drunk carousing, screaming, and fighting right outside our doors until dawn both nights. On Sunday, they must have gone out to a club because they weren't really noisy until 4 AM, when they went through the hall loudly ripping down the signs that Mike had put up: "Quiet, baby sleeping!" The following morning, they denied having anything to do with it. Ha.
Once again, things settled down again, and even last night, the final night of the concerts, things were pretty quiet because our rooftop was crawling with police.
The Boats:
I am interested in sailing in the sense that I think it's cool and would like to do more of it, but the past two weeks didn't inspire me much, or add anything significant to my knowledge of boats and sailing as I was too busy with the stuff of everyday life. The race is a one-class event, meaning that all of the boats are almost exactly the same. They're like floating billboards, as you can see by the row of them lined up in the dock.
The Puma boat, below, was the best billboard, in my opinion:
To get an idea of scale, you can see here the crew and some other people around the Telefonica boats on the day of the in-port racing, and a guy up on the mast of another of the Volvo 70s.
I found all the other boats in the harbor a bit more interesting. First of all, there were about fifty jillion of them (over a hundred yachts, in any case). Below is picture of them crammed into the harbor parked six deep along the edges, and another of the mass exodus that happened an hour ago after the racing boats left:
It took only an hour to virtually clear the harbor of boats this afternoon. The Galway Hookers were pretty much the only boats that went out under sail power. I found the small number of these traditional boats somewhat depressing. The organizers made an effort to gather together all of the Galway Hookers in the universe, and could only muster about seven of them. They're docked on the left-hand side of this photograph, with the earlier-mentioned swan boat nearby, under the windmill.
Numbers and the Weather
The thing that really made the festival a success was the distinctly un-Irish weather we had for the fortnight: warm, sunny days, one after the other until you'd think someone had shipped the whole island 30 degrees south in latitude. The latest rumor I heard was that the whole event had drawn over 250,000 people, which is pretty good considering that the population of Galway is only about 70,000 and the yachting scene in Ireland is very small.
One more rumor capped the event: last night at dinnertime, a good friend of mine phoned, breathless with the news that U2 were staying at the G Hotel and was maybe going to play last night with The Stunning, or this midday when the president of Ireland was giving her speech. No such luck. They say you can't have a party like this in Ireland without generating U2-related rumors.
Nova fell asleep every night to the sound high-decibel music, most of which was pretty good. I didn't adapt quite so well, and have been awake past my bedtime every night for fourteen days running. I had intended to blog about the festival as it was happening, but when the time came I couldn't stand to look at it any more than I absolutely had to. I enjoyed some of it, but annoyance won out as often as not. Here's an abbreviated log of the two weeks as seen from our apartment.
Arrivals and Opening Ceremony:
I didn't get any pictures of the arrival night, but boy, was it a long one. The band played until 11pm, I had settled down to sleep by midnight, and then at 2 AM it started up again as the first boat came across the finish line. I would have almost enjoyed it except for the incredibly annoying announcer, who said at one point:
"Now, they say we're not allowed to have any music, but you [the crowd] can make music!" He encouraged them to sing "The Fields of Athenry," which didn't really take off, but y'know what? 10 minutes later, loud music piped in to accompany the Irish dancers who were there to greet the ships.
He finally piped down a bit at 4 AM, saying something about people in the neighborhood sleeping, but there were still fireworks on and off until 8 AM, when the last of the boats arrived. By early afternoon that day, all of the racing boats had been lifted out of the water by the crane and were sitting in cradles behind the Harbour Hotel.
That first night of sleep deprivation went a long way towards souring my mood about the whole event, but I still managed to enjoy some of the rest of it. The following night brought the opening ceremony, which featured more fireworks, more Irish dancing, and an old wooden fishing boat dressed up like a swan. Here's a picture of the flares. My camera wasn't up to the task of capturing the midnight event in all its fireworks, but this is the best shot I got:
Midweek lull:
Things settled down after those first two nights, and we experienced blissful quiet from 11:30 PM until mid-morning from Monday to Thursday night. Then the real trouble started -- we got new neighbors, about thirty of them, drunk and noisy from Friday night straight through the weekend. Friday and Saturday night were the worst, with drunk carousing, screaming, and fighting right outside our doors until dawn both nights. On Sunday, they must have gone out to a club because they weren't really noisy until 4 AM, when they went through the hall loudly ripping down the signs that Mike had put up: "Quiet, baby sleeping!" The following morning, they denied having anything to do with it. Ha.
Once again, things settled down again, and even last night, the final night of the concerts, things were pretty quiet because our rooftop was crawling with police.
The Boats:
I am interested in sailing in the sense that I think it's cool and would like to do more of it, but the past two weeks didn't inspire me much, or add anything significant to my knowledge of boats and sailing as I was too busy with the stuff of everyday life. The race is a one-class event, meaning that all of the boats are almost exactly the same. They're like floating billboards, as you can see by the row of them lined up in the dock.
The Puma boat, below, was the best billboard, in my opinion:
To get an idea of scale, you can see here the crew and some other people around the Telefonica boats on the day of the in-port racing, and a guy up on the mast of another of the Volvo 70s.
I found all the other boats in the harbor a bit more interesting. First of all, there were about fifty jillion of them (over a hundred yachts, in any case). Below is picture of them crammed into the harbor parked six deep along the edges, and another of the mass exodus that happened an hour ago after the racing boats left:
It took only an hour to virtually clear the harbor of boats this afternoon. The Galway Hookers were pretty much the only boats that went out under sail power. I found the small number of these traditional boats somewhat depressing. The organizers made an effort to gather together all of the Galway Hookers in the universe, and could only muster about seven of them. They're docked on the left-hand side of this photograph, with the earlier-mentioned swan boat nearby, under the windmill.
Numbers and the Weather
The thing that really made the festival a success was the distinctly un-Irish weather we had for the fortnight: warm, sunny days, one after the other until you'd think someone had shipped the whole island 30 degrees south in latitude. The latest rumor I heard was that the whole event had drawn over 250,000 people, which is pretty good considering that the population of Galway is only about 70,000 and the yachting scene in Ireland is very small.
One more rumor capped the event: last night at dinnertime, a good friend of mine phoned, breathless with the news that U2 were staying at the G Hotel and was maybe going to play last night with The Stunning, or this midday when the president of Ireland was giving her speech. No such luck. They say you can't have a party like this in Ireland without generating U2-related rumors.
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