Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Polish tallship

A Polish flagged tallship which arrived into Dublin Port yesterday evening had also its own Sea Shanty choir on board, writes Jehan Ashmore.

The sail training ship, STS Kapitan Borchardt of the Polish Scouting Association once a year, brings the floating choir members of the Zawisza Czarny on a voyages to perform concerts in ports and to celebrate their home port of Gdynia.

The vessel built in 1918 is the oldest sailing ship currently flying the Polish Flag which last month took part in the Tall Ship Races with a call to the UK host port of Hartlepool, an English North Sea port.

Kapitan Borchardt has since also visited this week Belfast, Ardrossan on the Forth of Clyde and off the Scottish mainland, Port Ellen on Islay.

On arrival to Dublin Port, the tallship took a berth on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay where it will remains in the port for its second overnight in the capital.

The male choir of Zawisca Czarby is made up of crew members of the Kapitan Borchardt and ‘singing sailors’ and is believed to be the largest, regularly performing sea shanty choir in the world.

On such ports of call, the Zawisza Czarny choir welcomes the public to visit the quay and witness the amazing Sea Shanty Choir, as they perform from the tall ship’s deck and keep this maritime tradition and heritage alive.

Singers range between 18 and 70 and total 50 in a choir that is Poland’s only sea shanty choir and is recognized as one of the world’s finest in its category.

Tomorrow, in the early hours, marks another leg of the tallship’s crew choir, as it departs on a 7 night passage calling to Plymouth, Cornwall and ending in Cherbourg, France.

Published in Tall Ships

The Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) Information

The creation of the Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) began in a very low key way in the autumn of 2002 with an exploratory meeting between Denis Kiely, Jim Donegan and Fintan Cairns in the Granville Hotel in Waterford, and the first conference was held in February 2003 in Kilkenny.

While numbers of cruiser-racers were large, their specific locations were widespread, but there was simply no denying the numerical strength and majority power of the Cork-Dublin axis. To get what was then a very novel concept up and running, this strength of numbers had to be acknowledged, and the first National Championship in 2003 reflected this, as it was staged in Howth.

ICRA was run by a dedicated group of volunteers each of whom brought their special talents to the organisation. Jim Donegan, the elder statesman, was so much more interested in the wellbeing of the new organisation than in personal advancement that he insisted on Fintan Cairns being the first Commodore, while the distinguished Cork sailor was more than content to be Vice Commodore.

ICRA National Championships

Initially, the highlight of the ICRA season was the National Championship, which is essentially self-limiting, as it is restricted to boats which have or would be eligible for an IRC Rating. Boats not actually rated but eligible were catered for by ICRA’s ace number-cruncher Denis Kiely, who took Ireland’s long-established native rating system ECHO to new heights, thereby providing for extra entries which brought fleet numbers at most annual national championships to comfortably above the hundred mark, particularly at the height of the boom years. 

ICRA Boat of the Year (Winners 2004-2019)