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Displaying items by tag: Bressie

Musician Niall Breslin has set out on a challenging 300km voyage kayaking the River Shannon from Dowra to Limerick to raise funds for mental-health resources.

Breslin, or Bressie as he’s widely known, is part of a group with five other inexperienced kayakers taking part in The Rising charity challenge, as Newstalk reports.

“I haven’t thought it through in any shape,” Bressie told Newstalk’s The Hard Shoulder before heading to the start in Co Cavan,

“I don’t fit in a kayak as well which is a bad starting point - so, I’m kind of squeezing myself into it.”

Commenting on social media on Friday (30 June) after his first day on the paddle, from Dowra to Carrick-on-Shannon, Bressie said: “It was no what I expected. A real challenge.”

He added: “We had to talk the first 3km because of rocks and how shallow it was. Lough Allen hit us hard. Wasn’t in a great mood. We had to fight every second to get across. We are all exhausted and I also sprained [an] ankle but we are still rocking.

“Thank you so much to everyone who came out to support us today. Really helped get us through.”

Newstalk has more on the story HERE.

Published in Kayaking

William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago