read tab delimited file from a certain line

Hi

I would like to read table data from a text-files with extra 
informations in the header (of unknown line count). Example:

informations (unknown count of lines)
... and at some point the table
------
year month mday value
2013 1 16 0
...
				
If it was an excel file I could use something like read.xls(..., 
pattern="year") But it is a simple tab seperated text-file. Is there an 
easy way to read only the table? (Without dirty things ;))

Thx
Christof