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Displaying items by tag: Heartbreak Pier

#CorkHarbour - An historic pier in Cork Harbour, where an estimated 1 million Irish emigrants bade farewell to loved ones as they left for America and Canada is about to be saved in a major €500,000 restoration project.

According to The Irish Times, Heartbreak Pier, as it was dubbed by locals in Cobh, was the departure point for generations of Irish emigrants from the then Queenstown, including the 123 people who boarded the SS Titanic on April 11th, 1912.

The Titanic passengers departed from the White Star Line Pier on board the tenders PS Ireland and PS America to join the ship, which had moored off Roche’s Point before departing for New York.

Of those 123 passengers, just 44 were to survive when, on April 14th, the SS Titanic hit an iceberg some 600km south of Newfoundland and went down with the loss of 1,517 lives.

Click here to read  more on this story.

Published in Cork Harbour

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.