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Displaying items by tag: FIRST 45

French Manufacturer Beneteau, the world's largest production yacht builder is celebrating success in December's Sydney-Hobart race.

Following the historic success of 2009 when two FIRSTs occupied the first two places in the overall IRC and ORC rankings, the 2010 race has seen another Beneteau double as two Firsts won their class in the 600-mile offshore fixture.

True to its reputation, the 2010 race took place in extreme conditions with winds reaching 45 knots and the suspense maintaine right to the end.

The well-named FIRST 45 Victoire won the race in IRC2. The FIRST 40 Paca was the winner in IRC3.

The Irish agent for Beneteau is BJ Marine.

Published in Offshore

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.