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Displaying items by tag: SpaceX

The Irish Coast Guard was on standby for last night’s planned SpaceX launch, which was scrubbed at the final hour due to poor weather conditions.

The Falcon 9 rocket had been due to lift off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida last night (Wednesday 27 May) with the first US launch of American astronauts in nine years to the International Space Station.

And with the flight path taking taking the SpaceX mission — the first with humans on a commercial spacecraft — around the Atlantic and just past Ireland, the coastguard here was ready to respond if the mission were aborted off Irish shores. The Irish Examiner has much more HERE.

While the closing weather window put paid to last night’s launch with minutes to go, it’s possible NASA and SpaceX will try again this Saturday evening 30 May — and it’s expected the Irish Coast Guard will remain just as vigilant.

Published in Coastguard

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)