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Displaying items by tag: Mike O'Shea

#Adventure - An Irish duo have returned home after crossing the world's largest frozen lake in Russia.

As RTÉ News reports, Mike O'Shea from Dingle and Clare O'Leary from Bandon traversed the 640km-long Lake Baikal in Siberia over 26 days, contending with temperatures 30 degrees below freezing.

The challenge was the second mission in the veteran adventurer pair's 'Ice Project', an attempt to cross the world's main ice caps before the end of 2016.

Their next adventure will be a crossing of either Iceland or Greenland - where another intrepid group of Irish adventurers are headed this summer, as previously reported on Afloat.ie.

Meanwhile, rower Paul Gleeson writes in The Irish Times about his own upcoming challenge, joining three other men in a 25ft rowing boat to travel the 2,000 miles of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic.

Limerick man Gleeson, who is now based in Canada, compares the trek to the infamous Franklin Expedition through the passage in the mid 1800s - a tragic mission with an Irish connection through its second-in-command Francis Crozier.

The Irish Times has much more on the story HERE.

Published in News Update

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.