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Displaying items by tag: screening

#ROYAL CORK - It was "uncharted waters" for the Royal Cork Yacht Club in Crosshaven last night as it hosted its first ever film screening, a showing of the John Huston classic Moby Dick.

The epic adventure, starring Gregory Peck, was shot on location in nearby Youghal, and tells the story of the obsessed Captain Ahab's pursuit of the titular whale.

Joleen Cronin of the Crosshaven Film Club told the Irish Examiner: "There are lots of people throughout Cork who were involved in the making of the film and it’s a real celebration of movie making and special effects for its time."

The screening is hoped to be the first of many special events at the world's oldest yacht club, which will be hosting the biennial Cork Week regatta from 7-13 July.

Published in Royal Cork YC

#SURFING - The world governing body for surfing is set to roll out drug screening for competitors and officials at its sanctioned events this year.

As The Guardian reports, the move by the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) comes after the drug-related death of top surfer Andy Irons in November 2010.

The former three time world champion was found to have died from a hart attack combined with "acute mixed drug ingestion".

Irish surfer Gerry Fitzgerald told the paper that drug-taking is "not sustainable" for top-level surfers on the circuit. "Athletes are training hard, the way the contests are now, it will catch up with you," he said.

Testing for performance-enhancing and recreational drugs is already carried out at a number of professional events in the UK and Ireland, according to This Is Cornwall.

Matthew Knight of the steering committee for the British Surf Championships welcomed the change, admitting that surfing had been a "dinosaur" in its approach to drug testing and needed to catch up with other sports.

However some concerns have been raised that the move could damage surfing's credibility as an 'underground' phenomenon.

"Part of its appeal is that it is counter-cultural, marginal and in some way subversive and that's where the association with drugs comes in, whether real or mythic," surfer and author Andy Martin told The Guardian. "How mainstream can surfing be before losing its soul?"

Published in Surfing

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