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Displaying items by tag: Mark Duffy

#Coastguard - The funeral of Irish Coast Guard Captain Mark Duffy took place in Blackrock, Co Louth yesterday (Thursday 30 March), as The Irish Times reports.

President Michael D Higgins was among those in attendance to pay respects to the long-serving coastguard pilot, husband and father of two, who died when the Dublin-based Sikorsky S-92 helicopter carrying him and three fellow crew went down off the Mayo coast on 14 March.

Capt Dara Fitzgerald was recovered within hours of the incident but died in hospital shortly after.

Capt Duffy’s remains were recovered earlier this week from the cockpit of Rescue 116, on the sea bed off Black Rock west of the Mullet Peninsula, where divers continue to work amid “hugely challenging” conditions.

Salvage experts who helped recover Rambler 100 off Fastnet in 2011 are now being drafted in to assist in the lifting of the helicopter wreck in the search for missing crew men Paul Ormsby and Ciaran Smith.

The Irish Times has more on the story HERE.

Published in Coastguard

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