Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: No service (1 week)

Operator Stena Line will cancel all sailings for a week from one Welsh port as a ferry moves to the Holyhead-Dublin route for a temporary period.

The routes between Wales and Ireland have been hit by reduced demand due to post-Brexit trade distortion and national lockdowns.

Now Stena will take the opportunity to undertake its dry-docking programme for annual maintenance.

This will result in a new session of musical ferries on the Irish Sea.

The Stena 'Superfast' VII (see: related story) is going into dry dock and Stena Edda moves to cover the Belfast – Cairnryan route.

Stena Horizon switches from Anglesey to cover Edda on the Birkenhead route and Europe heads from Fishguard to Holyhead to keep two ships on that route. 

It will mean sailings between Fishguard-Rosslare are cancelled for just over a week.

But it could mean extra dockers brought back from furlough at Holyhead. They had been placed back on the UK Government scheme due to the impact of Brexit and Covid lockdowns.

More on this reports NorthWalesLive here.

Afloat adds that competitor, Irish Ferries operates the Rosslare-Pembroke route, the second ferry port in south Wales connecting the Wexford port, whose general manager last week made a call for a consolidated ferry service using just one of the Pembrokeshire ports. This to encourage hauliers back into using the ports and the UK land bridge.

In the same week, a Welsh Affairs Committee also heard it would make logistical and economic sense for Pembrokeshire to operate a single ferry port, and possibly served by two companies linking Rosslare Europort which in recent months has seen an explosion in traffic given 'Brexit-Bypass' demand.

Published in Stena Line

Coastal Notes Coastal Notes covers a broad spectrum of stories, events and developments in which some can be quirky and local in nature, while other stories are of national importance and are on-going, but whatever they are about, they need to be told.

Stories can be diverse and they can be influential, albeit some are more subtle than others in nature, while other events can be immediately felt. No more so felt, is firstly to those living along the coastal rim and rural isolated communities. Here the impact poses is increased to those directly linked with the sea, where daily lives are made from earning an income ashore and within coastal waters.

The topics in Coastal Notes can also be about the rare finding of sea-life creatures, a historic shipwreck lost to the passage of time and which has yet many a secret to tell. A trawler's net caught hauling more than fish but cannon balls dating to the Napoleonic era.

Also focusing the attention of Coastal Notes, are the maritime museums which are of national importance to maintaining access and knowledge of historical exhibits for future generations.

Equally to keep an eye on the present day, with activities of existing and planned projects in the pipeline from the wind and wave renewables sector and those of the energy exploration industry.

In addition Coastal Notes has many more angles to cover, be it the weekend boat leisure user taking a sedate cruise off a long straight beach on the coast beach and making a friend with a feathered companion along the way.

In complete contrast is to those who harvest the sea, using small boats based in harbours where infrastructure and safety poses an issue, before they set off to ply their trade at the foot of our highest sea cliffs along the rugged wild western seaboard.

It's all there, as Coastal Notes tells the stories that are arguably as varied to the environment from which they came from and indeed which shape people's interaction with the surrounding environment that is the natural world and our relationship with the sea.