Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Capital Dredging

A dredging campaign for this year is currently underway as the Dublin Port Company was granted a loading and dumping permit at sea, writes Jehan Ashmore.

Back in September 2016, a Dumping at Sea Permit was issued to DPC by the Environmental Protection Agency. The permit from the EPA allows for the continued loading and dumping at sea of dredged material arising from a capital dredging campaign as part of the Alexandra Basin Redevelopment (ABR) Project.

In addition the ABR includes the ability to accommodate the largest cruise liners based from a proposal to incorporate such new berths.

This day last week a Cruise Consultation was launched by DBC for the views of the public and stakeholders alike to be engaged in the redevelopment among them the proposed cruise-berths located at the North Wall Quay Extension.

Such cruise berths would be sited on the seaward side (as pictured) of the Tom Clarke (East-Link) Bridge. Construction of the berths is scheduled to begin in 2024 and be completed in readiness for the 2026 cruise season.

In the meantime, a Cypriot flagged trailing suction hopper dredger, Freeway,which carried out works in Dublin Bay for last year's campaign, returned last week to the port. Dredging operations are due to be completed by March 2020.

Irish Dredging Co. Ltd., which is a company within the Dutch based Boskalis Group, was the appointed contractor by Dublin Port. This sees Freeway, fourth in a series of 4,500m3 capacity hopper dredgers, carry out such duties between the port and out into Dublin Bay close to the Burford Bank.

Built in 2015 by Shipkits of Groningen, Freeway's design allows for operations conducted in shallow waters, for maintenance tasks within ports in addition coastal protection projects.

Published in Dredging

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.