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Displaying items by tag: New 1916 Exhibition

#Exhibition - A new permanent display commemorating the gun-running ship Aud opened recently on Spike Island, Cork Harbour.

The exhibition writes East Cork Journal honours the men and crew of the German vessel which was scuttled in the harbour in 1916.

The German crew were attempting to deliver weapons as part of the preparations for the Easter Rising, when the ship was trapped by a blockade of British ships.

9 April: SS Libau masquerading as the SS Aud under the command of Karl Spindler set sail for Tralee bay. Under Spindler was a crew of 22 men. The vessel was laden with an estimated 20,000 riffles, 1 million rounds of ammunition, 10 machine guns and explosives.

While the vessel was at sea the meeting date had changed to the 23 April.

20 April: The Libau / Aud arrived in Tralee bay unaware of the change of date. The crew were to Rendezvous with Roger Casement who was landed close by, by a German u-boat.

The ship was spotted by a blockade of British ships and escorted towards Cork Harbour.

22 April: At exactly 6:30pm the crew scuttled the ship outside Cork Harbour.

If the meeting had gone as originally planned and the Irish kept their side of the agreement history may have been rewritten.

The exhibition is supported by the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gealtacht affairs.

Published in Coastal Notes

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.