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Displaying items by tag: Dublin Bay Biosphere

Small blue balls found on a North Dublin beach have prompted concerns around their origin and whether they pose a threat to a protected habitat, as the Irish Times reports.

Brian Bolger — who lives near Bull Island — says he has reported increasing numbers of the 25mm rubber-like spheres, both blue and orange, washing up on the island’s Dollymount Strand.

“We thought they were golf ball innards because there are two courses on the island,” he says.

But he later discovered that similar objects washed on an English beach were traced back to a nearby nuclear power station.

Those objects, known as Taprogge balls, are used in the cleaning process for cooling systems in power stations and other industrial processes.

It’s not yet confirmed if the balls found on Dollymount are of the same type, but their presence within the Dublin Bay Biopshere prompts concern for their potential to affect a sensitive habitat for many marine wildlife species.

The Irish Times has more on the story HERE.

Published in Coastal Notes

The Dublin Bay Biosphere Youth Committee is holding a ‘Monster Clean-Up’ on North Bull Island this Sunday 27 October from 2pm.

Get into the spooky spirit in this Hallowe’en-themed coastal litter pick-up event, and all taking part will be entered into a prize draw to win a family pass to Dublin Zoo.

All ages are welcome to join in — especially in costume — with all equipment provided as well as hot drinks for what will probably be a chilly day on Dublin Bay.

For more follow the hashtags #MonsterClean and #BiosphereYouth on Twitter and Instagram.

Monster Clean Up poster

Published in Dublin Bay

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.