Lough Erne Yacht Club

News > Maeve on Radio Ulster Again

Created: 6/29/2009 9:28:07 AM, Updated: 1/2/2010 4:02:13 AM

Maeve featured in LEYC's first media mention of 2010, top story in a review of Your Place and Mine's very best interviews of 2009.


Anne-Marie McAleese presents Your Place and Mine on Radio Ulster, Saturdays 8.05 to 9.00 am. On 25 July she described sailing in the Fairy Maeve, and this was repeated as the top first story at 08.05 on Saturday 2 January 2010 reviewing the best of 2009. It ended with an invitation to visit www.leyc.net.

She had broadcast about Maeve in the early years of YPAM and came to LEYC to meet her new owner Michael Whaley, to admire her restoration and to take the helm for a sail on Gublusk Bay, just as a Maguire maiden might have done in one of the fleet of sailing boats at Enniskillen Castle described by a Gaelic poet in 1580. Anne-Marie was due at the Castle after her sail.

There was chat also with Maeve’s past owner, Michael Clarke on the Fairy and wider history of sail on the Erne. Anne-Marie revelled in the Edwardian elegance of it all, as Maeve waltzed soft and dainty about the bay, 103 years old, her gleaming white hull and immaculate varnish work all a tribute to Michael Whaley’s superb craftsmanship.

A top Fairy helm also, the second photograph shows Michael receiving his sweepstake cheque prize for winning the 100th anniversary race on 6 June 2006, exactly a century after the Erne's first Fairy race on that date in 1906,

The programme was first broadcast on 25 July, and was available on the BBC website for a week therafter. Repeats included that in the review of 2009. If you missed it, or would like to hear it again, I can lend a CD copy.

Michael Clarke, LEYC Historian