Preparations for the 2024 Olympics are well underway over a year out from the competition, even if Ireland's boats still have to be qualified.
With the first tickets to Marseille - where the Paris Games' sailing competitions will happen - up for grabs in The Hague in August, securing a spot is at the forefront of everyone's minds.
2004 Olympian Rory Fitzpatrick, now Irish Sailing's Head Coach, jokes that they've the 'cheapest HQ for any sporting body in Ireland,' but their three container unit set up, directly behind the Commissioners of Irish Lights in Dun Laoghaire, is critical to their future ambitions.
Before they moved into the entirely self-funded €300,000 facility in May 2019 they were depending on different clubs to help them out, but now they're bringing all of their sailors together in one space.
Summer qualification for @Paris2024 looms for our sailing hopefuls and a number of Irish boats were out on Dublin Bay @IrelandSailing #rtesport pic.twitter.com/TKo5NAbKoS
— RTÉ Sport (@RTEsport) March 23, 2023
"We've great clubs to sail out of, and our team are all from different clubs, but it was extremely hard to coordinate our people, our equipment, our training in different spaces," Fitzpatrick explains.
"We operated like satelites, whereas now we can operate in unison and help each other to learn and develop more. It wasn't as easy to go sailing as it is now.
"A club is a club; it's a member space. We would be members but we have to respect their space as well. We need to have a gym, we need to have dedicated analysis space, we need our "lessons learned" unit for coming back from peark events and learning how to plan out and adapt again.
"It's cheap because they're mobile units, containers. There's three there; the body, mind and equipment. They're in a c-shape."
The massive advantage for Team Ireland is that this is a mobile unit, which can be moved if needs be. The plan is to bring the facility to Marseille, so that the sailors that qualify will be in familiar surroundings, if perhaps a few degrees warmer than they're used to on Ireland's east coast.
"We can plonk it down at the Olympic venue, and we can plonk it down here and have the same thing," Fitzpatrick points out.
"It's function over form. It's all the things you need in a day and they're three feet apart."
While the sailors are attempting to qualify a boat in a given discipline, that doesn't guarantee them a place in Marseille. Irish Sailing will have the final say when they nomiate an athlete to fill the qualified boat after a series of trials.
Finn Lynch, who will be 27-years-old by the time The Hague comes around, made it to the Olmypics at Rio before missing out in Tokyo two years ago.
It was the lowest point in his sailing career, but it has given the Carlow man a new perspective as he looks to make it to a second Olympics.
"I hit rock bottom," Lynch says of the 2020 Games.
"I couldn't have got much worse. I was trying to compete to win a medal, and not qualifying was just heartbreak.
"Once you got there you realise that your family still loves you. Not much really changes in your life so after hitting that low I came back with a new outlook.
"I wasn't scared of failure and that meant I was able to sail more freely. That led to better results, and you build confidence, and here I am, having been ranked in the top five in the world for over a year.
"When I didn't qualify I definitely thought about stopping but I said I'd give it one more shot, because I couldn't end it on the qualification regatta where I sailed so badly.
"That summer [of the Olympics, 2021] I came seventh in the Europeans and second in the Worlds, so that was a reminder that I'm pretty good at this, and that I should give it a go.
"In terms of growth and becomig a better athlete, it was a game changer."
Qualifying at the Hague is the first of four chances that Irish competitors will have to reach next year's Games.
Finn, who competes in the ILCA 7 class (formerly Laser Standard), has been working alongside three-time Olympic medalist Vasilij Zbogar from Slovenia as he looks to put Tokyo firmly behind him.
"It's everything," he says of trying to reach the Games once more.
"The two weeks after a peak event, once a year, is when you can switch off. Even times where I'm off the water I'm still on the bike for 15 hours that week.
"It's a full-time job. I'm obsessed with the goal and it's my whole life."
Someone who is looking to reach her first Olympics is Sutton's Eve McMahon.
The ILCA 6 sailor, formerly the laser radial class, is looking to replicate the success of Annalise Murphy, who took a silver medal in Rio, after going agonisingly close at her first Games in London four years previously.
"I helped Annalise in 2021 in Tokyo," McMahon says.
"I was a training partner, so I worked alongside her the whole way through, which was an amazing experience."
McMahon is ambitious, and has done some work with 2020 Olympic champion Anne-Marie Rindom.
"It's not that often that you get to line up against an Olympic gold medalist, so that's been a huge experience for me and my sailing," she adds.
"Annalise set up the relationship with them [Danish team] and we've been training with them for about nine years. We all get along with them so well as friends."
Of the first qualifer in The Netherlands, she adds: "It's a big challenge. I always had it in my mind since I was really young to compete at an Olympics.
"I've been working towards it all my life. I've gone with a pathway to get into the Olympic class boat at a very early stage, to get used to it and have a lot of experience the whole way through.
"It's something that I would like to do for many years. I've trained so far for it, so I'm just looking forward to seeing the journey."
While each individual competitor is naturally thinking about their own route to the Olympics, Fitzpatrick is trying to look at the bigger picture for the team, as a whole, with a target of three boats in the water on France's Meditteranean coast.
"We contest in four classes, because of our budget and size as a country," he points out.
"We want our older athletes to be contesting for a medal. It's something we're trying to push to in our performances all the time.
"Finn got that silver in the worlds just over a year ago, and he's a consistent top-10 sailor. You want to be getting to the end of championships, and in the story of contesting for medals when you're at that age.
"If you're younger, like Eve, you want to go the Olympics for an experience. That's not getting the t-shirt, that's doing your best, and learning what that means and how your respond to it."
Different ambitions but a common goal as Ireland look to add to the two silver medals picked up by our sailors at Olympic Games.
