Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Plea to UK Gov

Councillors in Devon have urged the UK Government to hurry up and get a deal over the line to reopen Appledore Shipyard.

Despite a union-led protest march, a 9,500-strong petition and the efforts of local MPs, the north Devon shipyard closed on March 15, 2019, when Babcock International’s lease expired.

Work has continued ever since to reopen the historic shipyard, but as of yet, no date for any reopening has been announced.

More on this story Devon Live reports including footage of the shipyard's covered building hall, the Bidna Yard.

Afloat adds the 118m dry-dock is where Babcock built their last vessel in 2018, the Irish Naval Service LÉ George Bernard Shaw (as pictured) berthed at the shipyard's Newquay Yard. This fit-out facility was completed in 1970.

 

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.