Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Some positive news for watersport safety – recreational and commercial vessel activity accounted for just over one per cent of all drownings in Ireland in a five year period from 2017. That means the lifejacket legislation is working, as Water…

It would be stretching it a bit, and then some, to say that the J/109 has taken more than twenty years to become an overnight national success in Ireland. Nevertheless the versatile Rod Johnstone design – which first appeared in…

Over the next decade, the Irish Sea coast will have wind farms extending from Dundalk Bay as far as Wexford with a “bit of a gap around the Kish bank lighthouse”, according to cartographer John Coleman of La Tene Maps.…

The idea of an offshore race from Dublin Bay to Cork Harbour around the middle of July seems a no-brainer when you look at how sailing types spend their summers. Many cruiser-racers appear to move along that Leinster-to-Munster axis around…

The Inland Waterways Association of Ireland (IWAI) has to be one of the most successful organisations in the country. They have long since achieved their core objective of changing official perceptions to such a degree that the saving, maintenance and…

Our header photo really says it all. It was 2011 when Rives Potts' now four times Bermuda Race winner Carina rounded the Fastnet Rock in conditions a whole world away from the murky early morning eleven hours earlier, when George…

Saturday’s 1 pm start of the SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race is the high point of the biennial Wicklow Maritime Festival, while also concluding a series of shoreside events which included a Royal Ocean Racing Club breakfast in the Royal…

Big Dream, Little Boat is the brilliant title for Kevin O’Sullivan’s book, just published by Liffey Press, on his circumnavigation of Ireland solo by kayak. The retired Aer Lingus pilot, who has been very involved with the sea scouts in…

Should each SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race from Wicklow Sailing Club have a nominated “Flagship” to remind us that, with the passing of the years, this remarkable Royal Ocean Racing Club-supported 700-mile Classic now has its own colourful and complex…

 Along the Atlantic seaboard and up in the hills, they call them high stool days. Such days are with us when the weather is so thrawn that a particularly harsh period is best spent in agreeable indoor surroundings, with good…

A 143-year-old, unique wooden boat, the only one of its kind in the world, is heading for the Crosshaven Traditional Sail festival. Maintaining traditional boats is demanding, and when it’s the only one of its kind in the world, the…

Our header image this weekend may look like an ordinary enough photo of a handsome boat of a certain era getting skilfully underway using sail only. And some of those not of the cognoscenti may think it’s a slightly frantic…

With recent additions to the entry list including such glitterati as Pete Smyth of the Royal Irish YC with his newly-acquired Ker 46 Searcher (she was formerly Tonnere de Breskens to give the late great Dutch skipper Piet Vroon his…

County Clare is a place unto itself and a magic if challenging coastline for boats, bounded as it is by the Atlantic to the west, Galway Bay to the north, Galway County to the northeast, Lough Derg and the Shannon…

Irish international offshore sailor Joan Mulloy has recently completed a ten-day trip from Antigua to Portugal in a Mod 70 trimaran as part of the Famous project led by Dee Cafarri and Alexia Barrier, which aims to break the record…

When it was announced that the three-day Howth Wave Regatta 2024 would be in the last full May weekend of Friday 24th to Sunday 26th, there was a certain thoughtful sucking of the molars among the waterfront pundits. For this…