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Displaying items by tag: Sligo Coast Guard

Tributes have been paid to one of the Irish Coast Guard's longest serving and most experienced air-sea rescue crew member, according to Lorna Siggins of The Irish Times.

Noel Donnelly (55), who is retiring after more than 30 years' service, worked as winchman and paramedic. He completed his last shift at the Sligo Coast Guard search and rescue base last week and retires officially this month.

Originally from Tyrone, Mr Donnelly began his career with the Air Corps, flying in Alouette and Puma helicopters. He left in 1984 to take a job as a diver with a civil engineering firm in Aberdeen, Scotland, and subsequently worked as an ambulance driver in Co Kildare. For more about this article please click here

Published in Coastguard

New York Yacht Club’s biennial Invitational Cup

Ireland has a proud history in New York Yacht Club’s biennial Invitational Cup, with Irish participation from the very start and a podium result in 2019.

In 2009, two Irish Clubs,  Royal St. George in Dun Laoghaire and Royal Cork in Crosshaven, entered into New York's newest sailing competition that was reminiscent of Newport’s America’s Cup days when 19 yacht club teams from 14 nations descended on this “City by the Sea”.

The Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup is a competition between yacht clubs, with strict eligibility rules ensuring that each team is comprised exclusively of amateur sailors.

The competition, which was first run in 2009, has drawn entries from 49 clubs from 22 nations on all six inhabited continents.

The New York Yacht Club won the inaugural event in 2009, with the Royal Canadian Yacht Club winning in 2011 and 2013, England's Royal Thames Yacht Club winning in 2015 and Southern Yacht Club from New Orleans winning in 2017.

In 2019 the regatta was sailed for the first time in the New York Yacht Club’s fleet of IC37 yachts, and Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, from Australia, became the first Southern Hemisphere club to win the trophy. And it was in this edition that Anthony O’Leary’s Royal Cork team took the bronze medal.