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Displaying items by tag: Irish County Down

17th July 2009

Down Cruising Club

Down Cruising Club is a small, friendly club of approximately 100 members, who are interested in all aspects of boating and cruising on Strangford Lough. The club is fortunate to be based at Ballydorn, on Strangford Lough, and to enjoy the unique facility of club headquarters in the form of the lightship "Petrel". A short history of the club and of the Lightship can be accessed. In addition the club enjoys the facility of Ballydorn Quay, constructed in the mid 19th century, and its associated historic quayside store, the 'Black Shed'.

Club members participate in a wide range of social events on board "Petrel", and water-based activities, including cruises both within and beyond Strangford Lough. An important feature of membership of the club is maintenance of the lightship itself, through regular work parties. The general ethos of 'hands-on' involvement transfers to all activities, and to regular duties in assisting the club's bar.

Down Cruising Club, c/o Clubship Petrel, 52 Ballydorn Road, Killinchy, Newtownards BT23 6QB. Tel: +4428 9754 1663

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Published in Clubs

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.