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Displaying items by tag: santa

#santa – Santa Claus arrived by boat yesterday into Dun Laoghaire harbour and headed straight to a packed National Yacht Club where sackfuls of presents were handed out to children of all ages.  

Everyone – big and small – was entertained all day long, with the very special guest of honour arriving at noon and accompanied by his Elves.

Next weekend (December 14) Santa is scheduled to make another waterfront appearance at the Royal St. George Yacht Club and on the other side of Dublin Bay at Howth Yacht Club too.

 

 

Published in National YC

#SURFING - Here's a little something festive with four weeks to go till Christmas, as Afloat alum Markham Nolan highlights this wonderful photo of Santa Claus riding the waves on a stand-up paddle board via surfing website Magicseaweed.

The shot was captured by Rich Murphy over the weekend in Dublin, and not only shows Santa getting to trips with a new form of transport - but that even the east coast of Ireland has its fair share of quality swells.

Published in Surfing
Tagged under
21st December 2010

Ho Ho Hold-up

Yacht clubs in snowy weather are even odder than snow resorts in summer. But in America's sailing Mecca of Newport, Rhode Island, there was a further inversion at the East Providence Yacht Club on Sunday night after the annual pre-Christmas party reports W M Nixon.

Only a lone barman was left on the premises, and when a large fat white-bearded man dressed in red and carrying a sack came bustling in, he smiled a cheerful welcome. But the new arrival immediately brandished a gun, and by the time the police arrived he had cleared out all the weekend takings – "a lot" – and had made good his escape to the sound of jingling bells.

Published in Coastal Notes

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).