Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

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…

RNLI coxswain Mark Gannon with West Cork’s Courtmacsherry lifeboat was on a call out in December 1981 when he and his crew heard over the radio about the Penlee lifeboat disaster - when an entire lifeboat crew was lost off…

The National Yacht Club, handsomely sited in the southeast corner of Dun Laoghaire Harbour, was certainly looking its part as the current MG Motor “Sailing Cub of the Year” last Saturday morning. The sun shone, and in the crisp onshore…

Look for a surefire cure for seasickness, and no better person to ask than someone who worked on a lightship off the Irish coast. Lightship duty was both tough and boring, highly dangerous during wartime, and particularly hard on the…

The Royal Irish Yacht Club of Dun Laoghaire is so far the only club in Ireland which has indicated to Denis Byrne, Commodore of the governing Irish Cruiser-Racer Association and Vice Admiral of the Royal Cork YC, that it is…

There’s something special about a large organisation which is so attuned to the needs of the many services it quietly provides that it can - naturally and confidently and without fuss - move into action each year in a distinctly…

With the RORC’s new Griffin Project for training young sailors recently launched in a blaze of publicity, there have been the usual demands that something similar should be delivered for Ireland. But Sailing on Saturday would suggest that, over the…