THE HARDEST RACE ROUTES INTO THE UK?
Alan Baker responds to Jim Emerton's recent Elimar article
I read with pleasure Jim Emerton's recent articles on Elimar and I hope they become a regular occurrence. I would like to make a few comments and disagree about the Irish as distance fanciers.
They have gone backwards in my opinion when it comes to distance racing. They only fly around 500 miles and for me that is the top end of middle distance. There is of course the argument that theirs is the hardest route from the continent into GB & Ireland, an argument I have put forward and supported many times. However, I think there is an illogical argument that Irish 500 milers are the equivalent of mainland GB 600+ milers. My propositon is based on the statement 'horses for courses'. Take a two and a half mile chaser that wins in good conditions. Nine times out of ten such a chaser will not win in heavy conditions. And if you had two such horses with the previously mentioned capabilities (good and heavy winners) i.e. ability to get two and a half miles but no further, you would not get either at four miles even if the conditions were suited! Translate this principle to pigeons and specifically looking at the Irish route, I would say most of the time the conditions flying to Ireland in the King's Cup were 'soft/heavy going', rarely 'good', so the Irish are producing hardy pigeons equipped to fly 500 miles but they are not testing them at 600/700 miles. I am not saying they do not have such pigeons but they are testing birds in 'heavy' conditions to 500 and are more likely to be removing/culling their real marathon pigeons because such pigeons tend not to shine until past 500 and will have not given their owners good reason to keep them. If they had a 600 mile race then I would say with the toughest route in NW Europe they would be producing true long distance pigeons.
I note Jim says that he thinks long distance racing will return to Ireland and that would be fantastic; the route will develop great pigeons and Ireland has always had top fanciers to improve the progeny.
Jim also mentioned the route from Lerwick to South Wales, which is a real tough one, for me the toughest next to the International races on the mainland. Why? Well, because of the prevailing winds which are SW, which tends to mean the Lerwick pigeons fly some 200 mile over Ocean before hitting mainland Scotland and then it is a headwind for them all the way, but even tougher must have been the fly from Lerwick to Plymouth. What pigeons, what fanciers!
Finally I will mention a now defunct route that in my mind must have been the toughest apart from the Internationals and that was the east-west route from Strasbourg etc down into Cornwall, a headwind all the way even on light wind days and a couple of hundred miles fly across the Norh Sea. What a route that must have been and what fanciers those Cornishmen were!
Many thanks to Jim, who I always enjoy reading. He always stimulates my mind with his thoughts!
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