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Displaying items by tag: Vicky Ellis

#Clipper - Irishman Sean McCarter is among the 'dynamic dozen' skippers selected to lead their amateur crews in the ninth edition of the Clipper Round the World Race.

The 31-year-old is looking forward to a home crowd welcome when the race visits Northern Ireland on its final leg in summer 2014.

He will be joined by the third ever woman to skipper a Clipper crew in 30-year-old Vicky Ellis from Bristol, who has paid her dues as a training skipper over three years.

The 12 yacht masters, selected from hundreds of possible candidates in a rigorous process, now begin their final training ahead of the race start in August.

But first comes the crew allocation on 11 May, when the race hopefuls - including two Irish challengers - will find out who they'll be sailing with.

Published in Clipper Race

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.