Pat Walsh was the second owner of Sheila.
He bought her from Robert Groves in 1910, and later, in 1920, he bought Sheila II from him as well. He sold her in 1922.
During his time with Sheila, the boat stayed in Kingston (Dun Laoghaire – Dublin) She was swept out her mooring, floundered and was heavily dammaged in a 1914 during a storm and was restored. She was raced by Pat Walsh during the 1921 Lambay Race and finished 2nd.
Pat Walsh’s legacy to Sheila includes this trophee, but also the transformation of Sheila into a more sophisticated ship. Sheila got a new swept deck in Kauri Pine, which was later copied by Mike Burn. A filler piece was added to increase the draft by 5″. He had Sheila’s existing cabin coamings rebuilt. At this time, only one light was set on each cabin side, an unhappy alteration which was fixed in 1994. Pat Walsh introduced a second set of stays on the mizzen mast which are still part of her configuration today.
Pat Walsh was a member of the Humber Yawl Club, the Royal Irish Yacht Club and the Howth Sailing Club.
The following is extracted from Howth Sailing Club information.
‘The Humber Yawl Club had a member in Ireland, Pat Walsh of the Royal Irish YC in Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown), who was also an active member of Howth SC, serving on the committee. He was so taken with the canoe yawl concept that in 1901 he had the promising young Dublin boatbuilder and designer John B Kearney – then aged only 21 – to design and build him a 16ft clinker canoe yawl, the Satanella, which over several summers he shipped to the Continent to cruise the rivers of France, Germany and the Low Countries in the glowing days of peace before the Great War. His technique was to sail Satanella into Dublin port, and get her lifted aboard a ship headed for the river he’d chosen for that summer’s cruising
He kept Satanella for many years (she is now stored in the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum in County Down), but he also bought the little Albert Strange yawl Sheila (25ft) from the marine artist Robert E Groves, from whom in 1922 he was then to buy the larger Sheila II. Walsh remained an Albert Strange supporter, as his last yacht was the designer’s 7-ton counter-sterned yawl Venture. He was also much involved with the Irish Cruising Club (founded 1929), which he served as Honorary Secretary. But down the years the memory of this charming man is best evoked by this account he wrote for the Humber Yawl Club Yearbook of the Lambay Race in early August 1921, which he raced single-handed with Sheila 1. In Ireland at the time, the War of Independence had only recently drawn to a close (the truce had been signed on 11th July 1921), thus HSC weren’t permitted to fire guns, and used a foghorn to signal the start. But perhaps most intriguing of all, of the 13 boats racing round Lambay 92 years ago, ten are still in existence.’