The Fairfield Harbour Yacht Club Presents
The 2024 John Walsh Memorial Oar Race
August 31, 2024
Sailboat Racing from New Bern to Oriental, NC
Return Race to New Bern from Oriental via the NYRA Labor Day Regatta
Regatta at a glance:
The Fairfield Harbour Yacht Club will once again host its annual John Walsh Memorial Oar Race!
Operated together with the Neuse Yacht Racing Association’s Labor Day Regatta, this weekend has historically been the Neuse River’s most successful racing opportunity. The Oar Race has particular historical significance, dating back to the second World War.
Early in the Second World War, the British send an expeditionary force into Europe. The Brits were pushed back to the beaches of Belgium near the harbor of Dunkirk. The harbor was severely damaged by German bombing. Between May 26 and June 4, 1940, a total of 338,000 soldiers (198,000 BEF and 140,000 French and Belgian men) were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk back to England – some 30 miles away – by a rag-tag flotilla of 850 vessels. These vessels were mostly volunteer civilian amateurs, who carried an average of almost 400 men per boat. These volunteers all had to make multiple trips, some rowing, some sailing and some under power.
A retreat it may have been, but the humiliation of defeat generated the “Spirit of Dunkirk” that ultimately led to victory. That spirit is the ability of a people to come together and rise above adversity. The retreat from Dunkirk was perhaps second only to D Day as a factor in winning the war.
One of the vessels involved in the evacuation was the yacht Clara.
Clara’s owner was a friend of John Walsh, a now deceased member of FHYC. John was given an oar by Clara’s owner that was used during the evacuation. Each year in the Oar Race, we remember those stalwart volunteers who made the evacuation possible by sailing a race of similar distance as that of Dunkirk to England. The award for the overall winner is a replica oar, and the winner’s name is added to the original oar from Clara, which is displayed in the Fairfield Harbour Community Center.
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