Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Dublin Bay Yacht racing

#Lecture- "Dublin Bay, the Cradle of Yacht Racing-Rewriting the Story of our Sport", a public lecture by Hal Sisk, yachting historian is to be held next Thursday 3 April (8pm) at the Poolbeg Boat and Yacht Club, Ringsend in Dublin 4.

This is the final lecture of the Members of Glenua & Friends 2013-14 series held in the Ringsend venue from where there is a lecture entrance fee of €5 in aid of RNLI. For further details contact: 087 2129614.

The current series was very well attended and the organisers wish to thank you for your valuable support in that regard. Lectures will return in October and no doubt bringing more fascinating topics in the cosy surroundings of the Poolbeg clubhouse and bar.

Returning to the final lecture of this season, the topic of the amateur sport of sailing, as we know it, first emerged, not in Holland, not in Cowes, and not even in Cork, but right here in Dublin Bay!

Earlier "yachting" episodes used entirely professional crews, and the yacht owners and friends were little more than passengers. But from the 1850s in Dublin Bay the sport developed with active leisure sailors actually learning to sail and race their yachts themselves, as we all do today. And for two decades, 1855 to 1875, Dubliners led the world in shaping the sport, including setting the original rules, and also introducing such innovations as offshore and singlehanded racing.

With many illustrations from the paintings and photographs of the period, yachting historian Hal Sisk will show how much of a challenge it was to be the pioneers, and in what kind of yachts they sailed.
Hal's restorations of the classic yachts Vagrant and Peggy Bawn are exemplary in authenticity, and he has entertained audiences in five continents with his enthusiastic presentations.

 

Published in Boating Fixtures

Ireland's Trading Ketch Ilen

The Ilen is the last of Ireland’s traditional wooden sailing ships.

Designed by Limerick man Conor O’Brien and built in Baltimore in 1926, she was delivered by Munster men to the Falkland Islands where she served valiantly for seventy years, enduring and enjoying the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties.

Returned now to Ireland and given a new breath of life, Ilen may be described as the last of Ireland’s timber-built ocean-going sailing ships, yet at a mere 56ft, it is capable of visiting most of the small harbours of Ireland.

Wooden Sailing Ship Ilen FAQs

The Ilen is the last of Ireland’s traditional wooden sailing ships.

The Ilen was designed by Conor O’Brien, the first Irish man to circumnavigate the world.

Ilen is named for the West Cork River which flows to the sea at Baltimore, her home port.

The Ilen was built by Baltimore Sea Fisheries School, West Cork in 1926. Tom Moynihan was foreman.

Ilen's wood construction is of oak ribs and planks of larch.

As-built initially, she is 56 feet in length overall with a beam of 14 feet and a displacement of 45 tonnes.

Conor O’Brien set sail in August 1926 with two Cadogan cousins from Cape Clear in West Cork, arriving at Port Stanley in January 1927 and handed it over to the new owners.

The Ilen was delivered to the Falkland Islands Company, in exchange for £1,500.

Ilen served for over 70 years as a cargo ship and a ferry in the Falkland Islands, enduring and enjoying the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties. She stayed in service until the early 1990s.

Limerick sailor Gary McMahon and his team located Ilen. MacMahon started looking for her in 1996 and went out to the Falklands and struck a deal with the owner to bring her back to Ireland.

After a lifetime of hard work in the Falklands, Ilen required a ground-up rebuild.

A Russian cargo ship transported her back on a 12,000-mile trip from the Southern Oceans to Dublin. The Ilen was discharged at the Port of Dublin 1997, after an absence from Ireland of 70 years.

It was a collaboration between the Ilen Project in Limerick and Hegarty’s Boatyard in Old Court, near Skibbereen. Much of the heavy lifting, of frames, planking, deadwood & backbone, knees, floors, shelves and stringers, deck beams, and carlins, was done in Hegarty’s. The generally lighter work of preparing sole, bulkheads, deck‐houses fixed furniture, fixtures & fittings, deck fittings, machinery, systems, tanks, spar making and rigging is being done at the Ilen boat building school in Limerick.

Ten years. The boat was much the worse for wear when it returned to West Cork in May 1998, and it remained dormant for ten years before the start of a decade-long restoration.

Ilen now serves as a community floating classroom and cargo vessel – visiting 23 ports in 2019 and making a transatlantic crossing to Greenland as part of a relationship-building project to link youth in Limerick City with youth in Nuuk, west Greenland.

At a mere 56ft, Ilen is capable of visiting most of the small harbours of Ireland.

©Afloat 2020