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Displaying items by tag: Skiffie

Strangford Lough will stage the coastal rowing Skiffie World Championships  2016 this July.

Canada, England, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Tasmania, USA, Wales will bring a truly international flavour to the six day rowing event featuring 22ft, traditionally styled, wooden St Ayles skiffs, rowed by teams of four people plus cox.

Strangford Lough and Lecale Partnership, Scottish Coastal Rowing Association, Newry, Mourne and Down District Council and Ards and North Down Borough Council will welcome the coastal rowers to Strangford Lough from 24 -30 July 2016

All of the St Ayles’ skiffs have been built within their communities, thanks to a system that allows even non specialist boat builders to produce a high specification, traditionally styled wooden, racing boat.

Each boat has its own colours and names that are evocative of their home-places. The building of them brought people together from all walks of life and of all ages. They symbolise the bonds that have been forged between people within communities and now through competition the shared maritime heritage that binds coastal people the world over.

County Down has become a centre for coastal rowing with seven clubs already established long the coast, from Donaghadee to Dundrum, and others being set up. 

Published in Coastal Rowing

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.