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Displaying items by tag: Matthieu Girolet

A collision after the restart of the La Solitaire du Figaro off Kinsale this afternoon has resulted in the retiral of two of the leading competitors. Both boats have returned to Kinsale marina and withdrawn from the race.

After a general recall a 'violent collision' occurred during the build up to the second start between Swiss Bernard Stamm (Cheminée Poujoulat) and Matthieu Girolet (Entreprendre).

The collision was as a result of a port and starboard incident.

As both boats suffered from serious hull damage both skippers decided it was not safe to continue racing and abandoned the Solitaire.

Stamm's Figaro had a conspicuous hole on the bow (below) and despite all the other competitors' shore teams immediately started working on it, the damage was too extensive to be repaired in a reasonable amount of time.

Girolet's breakage was equally evident, and he also reported to have some parts detached inside the boat and there was doubt the rig was still intact.

Stamm will be given a DNF in the final ranking which means the last's time plus two hours. Racing continued for the other 42 skippers, who, before heading offshore had to sail a windward/leeward course between the Seamobile and the Radio France Marks, with a good breeze of 10 to 12 knots.

Bob Bateman's photographs of the damage to the Swiss boat, Bernard Stamm (Cheminée Poujoulat) is below:

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Preparing for La Solitaire du Figaro here

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Published in Figaro

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.