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#JamesJoyce – James Joyce began builders sea-trials today, she is the second of a trio of OPV90 class newbuilds ordered by the Department of Defence from a UK shipyard, writes Jehan Ashmore.

Afloat.ie has confirmed from the Department that an indicative date for the handover of the yet to be commissioned James Joyce will not be available until the sea trials are completed. She is to directly replace the decommissioned Aoife. 

It is understood that James Joyce departed in the early hours of this morning from Appledore, north Devon from where she was built by Babcock Marine & Technology.

The yard on the banks of the River Torridge is from where her predecessor, leadship LÉ Samuel Beckett (P61) was also floated-out in late 2013.

On that occasion the inaugural newbuild also carried similar trials in the Bristol Channel which took place almost a year ago. 

As recently reported, LÉ Samuel Beckett is undergoing annual maintenance works at Cork Dockyard.

A final sister also costing €54m was added to the original order for the first pair. The unnamed third newbuild will be launched from Appledore but not due for delivery until 2016. 

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.