Programme maker Ronan Kelly introduces this week's RTÉ Documentary On One production - listen to Skyhope above.
Feargal Ó Cinnéide says he has the oddest things crop into his head.
A few months ago, he recalled a story from 1977 about a ship that got stranded on a beach in Kerry. It ended up on the front page of the newspapers.
This random thought prompted him to do a bit of rummaging around on the Internet and he found a blogpost from a retired Welsh sailor who recalled the ship and the events that led it to be on the front of the paper.
Feargal is a fan of Doc On One and decided to pass the story on to the team to see if we could do anything with it.
Happily, we could.
We made contact with the Welsh sailor and he lined up a couple of his colleagues who he'd sailed with in 1977 and they sat down and told us the story of the stranded ship.
It was called Skyhope.
It was a Cypriot-registered ship with an international crew.
How did it come to be in Kerry in 1977? It was invited by a couple of local fishermen. They’d shared a few drinks with the Skyhope crew in Limerick and invited them to call in to their village if they were passing. Which Skyhope did.
One problem – the Skyhope's captain wanted to fill the ship with freshwater and wanted to tie up at the village pier to do this. Unfortunately, the ship was too large for the pier and got stuck.
No harm, the crew wanted to fill up at the village pubs and with the ship going nowhere, they had plenty of opportunity to do this. However, they fell out among themselves and one night, one of them hit the other over the head with a meat cleaver.
What followed was a disaster. Some of the crew jumped off the ship and onto a lifeboat which capsized. In all, 13 were adrift in danger of crashing onto the rocks or being blown out into the Atlantic.
The full story is told in Skyhope, courtesy of the Documentary On One team. But, particularly, courtesy of the marvellous mind of Feargal Ó Cinnéide.
Listen to more from Documentary On One here.
