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Displaying items by tag: Lilly Wainright

A Cork Harbour houseboat resident has told of his shock at seeing a “tornado” whipping towards him on Tuesday afternoon (21 May).

As Echo Live reports, Gavin Higgins was watching TV below deck on his converted classic RNLI lifeboat in Drake’s Pool when he was drawn to his cabin by a loud boom.

“It was a lovely day and I thought it was thunder, but I came up into my cabin and I saw this tornado making its way toward me,” Higgins says.

Video shot by passers-by shows the waterspout — the term for a whirlwind that forms over a body of water — whipping across the normally tranquil anchorage.

Luckily for Higgins, his houseboat the Lilly Wainright was unscathed in the incident.

“I always wanted to retire to Crosshaven and now I have,” the Doncaster native added. “I’m at home here, although I don’t know why God sent a tornado after me!”

Ireland is not known for such extreme weather events, but last December a tornado dealt significant damage to a number of moored motor cruisers in Co Leitrim, as previously reported on Afloat.ie.

Published in Cork Harbour

About Brittany Ferries

In 1967 a farmer from Finistère in Brittany, Alexis Gourvennec, succeeded in bringing together a variety of organisations from the region to embark on an ambitious project: the aim was to open up the region, to improve its infrastructure and to enrich its people by turning to traditional partners such as Ireland and the UK. In 1972 BAI (Brittany-England-Ireland) was born.

The first cross-Channel link was inaugurated in January 1973, when a converted Israeli tank-carrier called Kerisnel left the port of Roscoff for Plymouth carrying trucks loaded with Breton vegetables such as cauliflowers and artichokes. The story, therefore, begins on 2 January 1973, 24 hours after Great Britain's entry into the Common Market (EEC).

From these humble beginnings however, Brittany Ferries as the company was re-named quickly opened up to passenger transport, then became a tour operator.

Today, Brittany Ferries has established itself as the national leader in French maritime transport: an atypical leader, under private ownership, still owned by a Breton agricultural cooperative.

Eighty five percent of the company’s passengers are British.

Key Brittany Ferries figures:

  • Turnover: €202.4 million (compared with €469m in 2019)
  • Investment in three new ships, Galicia plus two new vessels powered by cleaner LNG (liquefied natural gas) arriving in 2022 and 2023
  • Employment: 2,474 seafarers and shore staff (average high/low season)
  • Passengers: 752,102 in 2020 (compared with 2,498,354 in 2019)
  • Freight: 160,377 in 2020 (compared with 201,554 in 2019)
  • Twelve ships operating services that connect France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain (non-Covid year) across 14 routes
  • Twelve ports in total: Bilbao, Santander, Portsmouth, Poole, Plymouth, Cork, Rosslare, Caen, Cherbourg, Le Havre, Saint-Malo, Roscoff
  • Tourism in Europe: 231,000 unique visitors, staying 2.6 million bed-nights in France in 2020 (compared with 857,000 unique visitors, staying 8,7 million bed-nights in 2019).