Tonight's Fireball dinghy racing in Dublin Bay, under the burgee of DBSC was cancelled due to a combination of factors - natural and man-made writes Cormac Bradley
The advent of the cruise liner season saw another mega-sized vessel anchored in the race course area of Scotsman's Bay. The inability of such vessels to enter Dun Laoghaire's harbour means that passengers are ferried ashore and "back to base" by a combbination of smaller boats and the cruise liner's own lifeboats. This heightened traffic meant that racing inside the harbour was not a possibility. Hence the man-made intervention!
Mother Nature "pitched in" with a stiff westerly that generated whitecaps for most of the day on Dublin Bay and while there was evidence of this dropping in strength as boats were being rigged, a decision to "blow" the evening was taken.
This forthcoming weekend sees the first of our summer regattas, The Open Championships, being sailed out of Skerries, further up the East Coast from Dublin Bay. Breeze, as usual for this location, is forecast. Numbers are a little low with 4 days to go. Thus far it looks like it will be a substantially DL fleet contesting the event. So to the readership of this column (of which there seen to be many), if you have a Fireball, we'd love to see you on the water!
