Today we’re heading onto the Beara Peninsula for a few days, but first there’s the All-Ireland Coastal Rowing Championships to take a look at.
The campervan area at the Westlodge Hotel was quiet overnight—and, TBH, not much busier in the morning.
After a slow start, we headed down into Bantry on the bikes to wander around the market before the rowing began at 12.
Bantry Market
It was fun to wander around the Friday market and see what people were selling. One whole section seemed to be more car boot sale than market.
There were lots of tool stalls…
Buggered Sink Not Syncing
We also had an errand to run. The sink in our wet room had “developed a fault.” It’s an unusual fold-down arrangement, with no drain hole in the basin itself. You do your sink stuff and then tip it up to drain. It clicks vertically into place with a push latch and, crucially, two magnets. The magnets are in the latch, with two metal discs bonded to the sink that are supposed to keep the sink in sync with it. Sue: I never liked that sink!
The other night, I spotted that one metal disc had come away from its mooring. Then, last night, the second disc came loose. So the sink won’t sync.
The errand, therefore, was to visit the Bantry hardware shop and buy some glue. Epoxy seemed the best option, so I bought some Evo-Stik epoxy doing an impersonation of Araldite. That’s this evening’s job.
We also bought a couple of self-adhesive hooks. The van is light on places to hang stuff, so we’re going to try them and see how we get on. We don’t want to drill into anything yet, and we accept that sticky hooks may quickly become unsticky hooks, but we’ll at least have tested the locations to see whether hooks work where we stick them.
But back to the market…
Crêpes and Galettes
We really lucked out with a crêpe and galette stall. The French guy running it was very happy to accommodate a chocolate-and-banana galette. Because his galettes were made with buckwheat, this one was gluten-free. Sue had a crêpe with the same filling. The crêpe guy was also very happy to talk about where we should go in our van—they had one too—and we chatted for much longer than a crêpe should really take to cook. Awesome crêpe and galette, though… not too much filling—that’s a real art!
A Quick Loo Stop with Confectionery
I wouldn’t normally make a note about our loo stops. Oh… OK… perhaps I would!
This one was amusing. The loos on Bantry Harbour were better than expected. Loos like these in the UK would be something to avoid, but these were relatively clean and had loo paper, soap and water. 4/10.
The gents also had an open bag of liquorice allsorts strewn across a shelf beside the urinals. Confectionery choice: 8/10. Confectionery hygiene: 1/10. You may wonder why it even gets a one. Well, it would have been zero, but they weren’t actually in the urinal!
All-Ireland Coastal Rowing Championships — Bantry 2026
After walking to the end of the quay and entering the rowing area, we wandered through the enclosure and found a coffee van from which we could survey the preparations—and, as it happened, the start of the racing.
The launch of the Bantry lifeboat didn’t go entirely without drama. The boat went down the slipway at quite a lick. No problems so far.
But there was a film crew on site: drones, tripods and biggish cameras. We later saw evidence that the event was being streamed on YouTube when it appeared on a screen in the hotel lobby. The crew had laid some sort of cable across the lifeboat slipway.
Twang!
The lifeboat took out the cable, and it twanged back towards us.
There was a fair bit of swearing from the camera team, but it wasn’t obvious which feed the lifeboat had taken out. Clearly, something wasn’t going to work as the film crew had planned that day.
The boat numbering went up to at least 62, so we’re guessing each racing boat would be used more than once and that not every boat was at the start.
At the captains’ briefing, I’d guess there were around 30 captains and therefore about 30 clubs.
The event announcer was, I must say, doing a good job of keeping everyone in order. She certainly wasn’t taking any prisoners. The competitors gave the impression that Mary was a force of nature: they were clearly told which toilets to use and that every race would start on time!
Then they began getting ready for the first race, which appeared to be for under-18 women.
And then they were off… However, boat 53 made the first error of the day and decided to turn at the first buoy rather than the second—oops!
Some people were watching—though not as many as we thought there might be. Perhaps they were all watching on YouTube!
And there were some winners…
Quite a few people had tried to explain what was going on. We accosted two participants while having coffee and found out that most races covered a 1,500-metre course—750 metres out and 750 back. There would be different distances for juniors and for the senior men’s race.
Sue also got talking to some under-21s who had travelled from Antrim. They explained a bit more to her, particularly about polishing their seats with furniture polish so they could slide more easily and avoid blisters on their bums. She also spoke to a Dutch family who wanted to know whether they should visit Cardiff or Bristol on their way home—Bristol, of course.
After the excitement of the rowing, we headed back to the hotel on our bikes—after popping into SuperValu again, of course.
The hotel campervan area had grey- and black-water disposal and a drinking-water tap. Even though we were due at a campsite that night, it never hurts to sort out the wet stuff in case plans don’t work out as hoped.
The Beara Peninsula and Castletownbere
We were on the road again.
Getting through Bantry was a bit of a pain because of the rowing traffic. Cars were parked in just about every conceivable space along the road into town. With the market on as well, it was busy.
The scenery was every bit as fantastic as the previous stretches of the Wild Atlantic Way, but we didn’t stop much and the weather was grey, so I didn’t take many pictures.
Then we reached Castletownbere and parked on the harbourfront next to three other vans. We seemed to be slightly in the way, but everyone else had parked there and there were no signs saying we couldn’t, so we locked the van and went exploring again.
We wandered around, had coffee and a slice of coffee-and-walnut cake at a café specialising in Colombian coffee—most of the menu turned out to be gluten-free—and bought a birthday card and stamp so we could send it back to the UK.
When we got back to the van, it hadn’t been clamped or towed, which is always a bonus. We then set off for tonight’s stop, Berehaven Golf Club.
Berehaven Golf Club
We eventually reached the camper park at Berehaven Golf Club, near Castletownbere, and settled in among the other vans overlooking the shore. What a view from the golf course!
Electric hook-up! Yay!
Roy, His Flat Battery and His Fish
As we were eating our dinner—baked potatoes, tuna and beans—a guy popped his head into the van and asked whether we had a car jump-starter power pack. His car battery was flat, and so was his own jump pack.
After tea, I dug ours out. It was flat too.
I wandered over to see Roy, and he tried starting his car again with the last of the charge in his pack, but no luck. We agreed that I’d charge mine overnight and see whether I could help in the morning.
With that in hand and the washing-up done at the building beyond the clubhouse, we decided to bimble over to the golf clubhouse for a pint. Two pints of Guinness and a bit of the European Athletics Championships from Birmingham.
Then Roy came over to our table to say that someone was going to pitch up (no pun intended… well, if you know me, that never happens; of course the pun was intended) with an industrial jump starter in the morning to get him going.
But we got talking, as you do over here. We talked about the wreck in the harbour, which you can clearly see poking out of the water from the clubhouse (a delight for the local diving club), probably even at high tide. We also talked about the mussel farms, where mussels grow on ropes suspended below the surface, and oyster farming, where mesh bags are commonly held above the seabed on trestles and turned periodically.
Roy told us he was fishing from the end of the promontory… even though he doesn’t eat fish. He lives in Cork and thought the fish we’d seen the kids pull from the River Lee the other day would have been mullet.
He was trying to catch mackerel from the quay, so we went down to the shoreline to see what he was up to, along with the two pints of Guinness he’d taken to his tent “for later”.
As Roy cast his lines, he was sure he was getting a nibble or two. After covering a few more topics, we said our farewells and left him, in the dusk, to his night fishing.
Then, about two minutes after we’d walked the 100 metres back to the van, Sue heard Roy shouting for his new best friend: “John! John!” He appeared with a sea bass in his hand that he wanted to give us for breakfast. I don’t really eat fish, and Sue didn’t want to gut it, so we declined. Sorry, Roy!
That’s been quite a day of excitement… so I’ll leave you on a cliffhanger: will Roy get jumped in the morning and will the sink stay sync’ed?
J
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