Cork Harbour's George Radley will contest this year's Fastnet Race on Imp, the outright Fastnet Race winner in 1977.
Radley and a crew, including his son, will compete on the blast from the past in the famous Ron Holland-designed IOR 40.
Built in Florida in 1976 for American owner David Allen, the following year Imp was top scoring boat for the 2nd placed USA Admiral’s Cup team and won the Fastnet Race outright. She also completed the disastrous 1979 Fastnet Race taking the USA Admiral’s Cup team to another second-placed finish. Since then, perhaps because of her stripy 1970s green paintjob, she has passed through several significant Irish owners and is today considered something of an Irish national maritime treasure.
Since 1994, Imp has been owned by Cork-based George Radley. He has continued Imp’s winning ways: coming first in the 1996 and 2000 Round Ireland Races and nearly winning again in 2002. Imp also won her class in the 1987 Fastnet Race, with Radley repeating this in 1997. “We were sixth overall out of 268 boats. I’m not saying she is going to do it again this time but she has always had a good run in the Fastnet.”
Radley and a semi-shorthanded crew raced Imp in the IRC class of the 2006 ARC and then in the Pineapple Cup from Miami to Jamaica, followed by two editions of Charleston Race Week before the boat shipped back to the UK for an intended refit that never happened. Finally, Radley in 2017, got Imp back to Ireland on a low loader and began the overdue refit, which was completed in 2022: “I just put new Harken deck gear and winches on her and I made the foretriangle a little smaller because she had 60sqm headsails - I can’t get anyone to pull those in anymore! You can’t even see where you are going!
“Around the cans, she is a handful, but in any offshore stuff, she can still go, believe it or not. Down to the Fastnet and back, we held our time against a J/122,” Radley reflects. Part of the reason for entering the Fastnet Race is that Radley’s son and bowman, also called George, is enjoying it just as much as his dad. “He just lives for it. I am trying to bring him along.”