IRELAND’S FASTNET rock will become the penultimate landmark for around-world sailors when the Volvo Ocean race returns to the west coast in two years’ time.
The race organisers have given more details of plans for the 2012 finish of the big race in Galway in the first week of July that year.
The will be just days before the traditional opening of the two-week Galway Arts Festival and it will be timed not to clash with the the opening of the London Olympic Games a few weeks later .
The race will visit eight stopover ports on five continents and race through four oceans, in under nine months, covering over 39,270 nautical miles racing around the globe.
The start will take place in Alicante in Spain and the finish in Galway will include an in-port race for the first time – but no circumnavigation of the island as originally mooted.
Volvo Ocean Race says that the “iconic islands of the Azores in the Atlantic, Fernando de Noronha off the Brazilian coast and the Fastnet Rock, the southernmost point of Ireland”, are all on the course.
The Fastnet is better known as the “teardrop”, being the last sight of land for emigrants leaving by sea early in the last century.
Host ports are Spain’s Alicante, followed by Cape Town in South Africa, Abu Dhabi in the UAE, Sanya in China, New Zealand’s Auckland, Itajai in Brazil, Miami in Florida in the US, Portuguese capital Lisbon, Lorient in north-west France and Galway.
Due to increasing pirate attacks and hijacking off Somalia, the fleet will sail around an exclusion zone, which will be added to this area nearer race time to help reduce the risk to the yachts.
The international yacht race generated almost €60 million in revenue when it stopped in Ireland for the first time last year, attracting some 650,000 people to Galway. Its main organiser, businessman and keen sailor John Killeen, recently received the freedom of the city of Galway as a tribute to his efforts.