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Displaying items by tag: yacht charter

The Irish National Sailing & Powerboat School in Dun Laoghaire Harbour want to hear from those who holiday abroad on charter yachts and those who may want to. Given the travel uncertainty emanating from COVID-19 restrictions, there’s a possibility to highlight the excellent cruising and holiday options here in Ireland.

Since the sailing school re-started yachting courses five years ago the vast majority of graduates both are new, or returning to sailing, and undertook the training to charter a yacht abroad.

With travel plans less certain, and the Irish tourism sector facing a huge challenge to get back on its feet the team at the school want to help those who might otherwise have skipped a sailing holiday do so in Ireland when it is safe to do so again.

Yacht Charter INSS 2The INSS has put together a two-minute survey to gauge the effect of COVID-19 on foreign charter holiday plans and to see if we can assist the Irish yacht training and charter industry in what will be a difficult year or two

INSS has launched a very short survey examining attitudes to chartering aboard and at home, and want to know what barriers exist to chartering a yacht.

The school’s chief instructor Kenneth Rumball describes their approach. “We know anecdotally that there is less demand for this sort of holiday at home, but we want to understand is there anything that we can do to change this. Ideally, we’d love to work with colleagues in the industry to help keep everyone afloat”.

The team are keen to hear your views, either by online survey or by getting in touch with the team in the office on 01 284 4195 or [email protected].

The survey can be found here

Published in INSS

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)