Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Returns from Med Migrant Rescue

#JoyceReturns - The LÉ James Joyce has since this report by The Irish Times returned to Cork Harbour this morning. The OPV90 class ship was welcomed by Minister of State for Defence, Paul Kehoe following a deployment in the Mediterranean in which saw some 2,500 migrants rescued.

The ship was deployed on July 8th following Government approval as part of Ireland’s response to the migrant crisis. Defence Forces Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral Mark Mellett will be in attendance at the homecoming at Naval Base at Haulbowline, Cork.

The LÉ James Joyce, under its captain Lieut Cdr Neil Manning, rescued 2,491 people and recovered 21 deceased people. The crew assisted the Italian authorities in the rescue of a further 1,082 people. The vessel and its crew of 59 has been replaced by leadship class sister LÉ Samuel Beckett, which departed last week.

Published in Navy

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.