Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Mitch Booth

#MitchBooth - Olympic catamaran sailor Mitch Booth has been booked to give a two-day high performance tutorial at Swords Sailing & Boating Club this May, organised by the Irish Multihull Association in tandem with the Avon Ri sailing school in Blessington.

An Olympic medalist in the Tornado two-handed multihull for Australia at the Barcelona and Atlanta Games, Booth later sailed internationally for the Netherlands, among his accolades winning bronze at the 2003 World Championships and gold at the 2003 Europeans.

Since then his sailing career has taken him further offshore, such as ocean racing in maxi cats, as well as in keelboats and the challenges of the America’s Cup.

Mitch Booth Swords SC session

Off the water, Booth was involved in the creation of the Olympic Tornado class rig, and he has more than 100 different multihull builds to his name — including A Class cats he helped design.

Lately, he is attempting to develop the the largest cruising catamaran ever built under the brand BlackCat Superyachts, as previously noted on Afloat.ie.

For details on how to attend the two-day tutorial, contact Swords Sailing & Boating Club HERE.

Published in News Update

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).