This last weekend has been truly glorious on the Island. The annual raft race on Friday was the usual colorful and bumptious happening, in some cases 3 generations of the one family combining mayhem and muscle in the pursuit of unbridled fun. Congratulations to John Maguinis, his son and grandchildren on their beginners luck and hopefully others will be inspired to join battle in next year’s event

Of course the main event was the Family Fun Day on Sunday and the North Harbour Area was in festive garments with buntings and flags including for the first time, the Cape Clear Flag flying proudly, an image of the Cape Clear Stone on a sea of blue. One resident, suggested that the next step would be to produce our own island coinage depicting the famous stone.

Fortune smiled as the rainy morning abated to a sufficient interlude of sunshine to cater for the events as planned. Congratulations to all who took part in the Triathlons, especially to Treasa Cadogan on her outstanding performance and to some of the younger and older participants for their perseverance and good humour. The music provided by Tom Riordan was much commented upon for its excellence and the face painting, nail bar, cake sale, buggy race, tug of war, sand castle competition and more saw all enjoy themselves. To date over €4,000 has been collected but the final tally is still to come. I met some highly impressed first time visitors to the Island who are already planning return visits.

Another innovation this year was the very successful boot camp on the Saturday provided by Faisil Abdalla who traveled over especially from the States and as the photo shows was well attended with some very impressive results indeed. As usual too many contributed to mention, but to all, go raibh mile maith agaibh and ‘come again soon’.