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Displaying items by tag: Fiann Paul

The Sara G, with Irishmen Rob Byrne and Adam Burke making up a third of the crew, set a new world record today by becoming the fastest boat in the history of ocean rowing.

They rowed the long route across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados in 33 days 21 hours and 46 minutes, setting the fastest average speed for the crossing. Less than a day before, Hallin Marine had set a record for rowing the Atlantic east-west of 31 days 23 hours and 31 minutes, but they had crossed from the Canaries to Barbados, a shorter journey.

The Ocean Rowing Society, which is the record keeper for ocean rowing, is set to grant the Sara G the Ocean Rowing Blue Riband trophy for their row.

The crew was Matt Craughwell and Dr Graham Carlin from England, Byrne and Burke from Ireland, Thomas Cremona of Malta and Fiann Paul from
Iceland.

Listen in to a podcast from Barbados with Rob Byrne and Irish Times Rowing Correspondent Liam Gorman.

Published in Coastal Rowing

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.