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A history of life on the ocean
BETWEEN 1923 and 1925 Limerick man Conor O’Brien (1880-1952), became the first Irishman to circum-navigate the globe when he sailed the Saoirse, a ketch built at the Fisheries school in Baltimore, West Cork, around the world.
During his epic voyage, he stopped off at Port Stanley in the Falkland Island . The islanders were so impressed with how the Saoirse rode the waves that they asked O’Brien to build a similar boat. He returned to Ireland with the order, and the Ilen, named after the river whose mouth is at Baltimore , was built in the same boatyard by the same builders to the same type as the Saoirse. The Ilen at 56 feet long, a beam of 14 feet and a displacement of 45 tones, was registered at the port of Skibbereen, County Cork, in February 1926 with two Cadogan cousins from Cape Clear Island bound for the Falklands . They arrived at Port Stanley in January 1927 and handed the Ilen over to the new owners, The Falkland islands Company, in exchange for 1,500 pounds. There she remained plying between the islands with a cargo of stores, mail and sheep, as well as ferrying passengers.
She stayed in service until the early 1990’s and returned to Ireland onboard a Russian cargo ship in the late 1997, in a voyage funded by the Hunt Museum .
In June 1998, Gary McMahon, the driving force behind the return of the Ilen, sailed her with skipper Paddy Barry and six others from Dublin to Baltimore, Ireland were she was greeted by a huge crowd on the pier.
Today, she is being refitted in Hegarty’s Boatyard,
near Skibbereen
in a project co-ordinated by the AK Ilen Trust, a charitable company. It provides an opportunity for people to experience the skills of wooden boat building through a series of five-day workshops.
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