Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Men & Women

#Seafarers - Over three million seafarers, both men and women live in the twilight world of big shipping according to the Seamens Christian Friend Service (SCFS).

Seafarers are responsible for most of the goods you will of had acquired over the Christmas season. It's a lonely life and as such they don't get to spend Christmas with their family.

Crews roam the world's oceans for up to 12 months at a time. They come from more than 100 different nations and speak dozens of language. For most of them accessing the internet is synonym of keeping in touch with the family.

This year, SEA-Tech Evolution Ltd, an Irish IT company established in 2007, worked with the Port of Cork, Port of Waterford and Rosslare at improving crew welfare. The company take this service very seriously but it is sometimes hard to convince the shipping industry of the benefits of decent internet connectivity.

Commenting on the benefits of such technology, Arnaud (R.no) Disant, Engineer (CTO) at SEA-Tech and Lecturer at National Maritime College of Ireland, said you know you’ve done something good this year when you see a smile on the face of a man that truly values your work.

 

 

Published in Ports & Shipping

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.