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Displaying items by tag: Dockside Festival, Belfast

#MaritimeFestivals - A month-long festival in Belfast Harbour is to start in the end of March at the Titanic Quarter.

Dockside Festival runs from 27 March to 20 April and as The Irish News reports the festival will be held in the Alexandra Dock & Wharf and on- board the visitor centre HMS Caroline.

Children can enjoy activity trails, arts and crafts while adults can avail of film screenings in the ship's Drill Hall as well as a series of lectures.

Over the Easter holiday there will be Woolly Workshops where children can make their own pom pom bunnies and carete a Blucher the Rabbit headdress.

Films being shown in HMS Caroline’s Drill Hall will include The Goonies (PG) on Friday April 13 and Piranha (18) on Friday April 20.

Jamie Wilson, General Manager at HMS Caroline, said the Pump House visitor centre "adds to what is already truly a captivating and enjoyable day of maritime adventure”.

HMS Caroline is operated by The National Museum of the Royal Navy and is the world’s last remaining floating survivor from the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Moored in Belfast since 1924, over the past four years HMS Caroline has been fully restored and fitted out with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund in Northern Ireland.

For a list of the festival highlights and dates, click here.

Published in Maritime Festivals

The Dragon was designed by Johan Anker in 1929 as an entry for a competition run by the Royal Yacht Club of Gothenburg, to find a small keel-boat that could be used for simple weekend cruising among the islands and fjords of the Scandinavian seaboard. The original design had two berths and was ideally suited for cruising in his home waters of Norway. The boat quickly attracted owners and within ten years it had spread all over Europe.

The Dragon's long keel and elegant metre-boat lines remain unchanged, but today Dragons are constructed using the latest technology to make the boat durable and easy to maintain. GRP is the most popular material, but both new and old wooden boats regularly win major competitions while looking as beautiful as any craft afloat. Exotic materials are banned throughout the boat, and strict rules are applied to all areas of construction to avoid sacrificing value for a fractional increase in speed.

The key to the Dragon's enduring appeal lies in the careful development of its rig. Its well-balanced sail plan makes boat handling easy for lightweights, while a controlled process of development has produced one of the most flexible and controllable rigs of any racing boat.