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Displaying items by tag: Terminal 3

Seatruck Ferries is to re-open the Dublin-Heysham route following the closure by DFDS Seaways of the freight-only service last month, writes Jehan Ashmore.

The first sailing of the revived route is scheduled to depart Heysham next Monday at 02.00hrs and the corresponding departure from Dublin is at 14.00hrs. Seatruck have yet to release the identity of the one-ship operated service, previously run by DFDS Anglia Seaways.

Seatruck decided to re-open the route based on strong demand and of the firm commitment to support the service from several road haulage firms.

To facilitate the additional business of the new route, Seatruck's existing use of Terminal 3 for its Dublin-Liverpool service will no longer be required. Instead all operations will be centred at Terminal 5, previously used by DFDS Seaways for their freight and passenger ferry vessels on the Heysham and Liverpool (Birkenhead) routes.

The company which is part of the Bahamas based Clipper Group Ltd (which controls 250 vessels) also operate between Warrenpoint-Heysham and Larne-Heysham. Seatruck operate an eight–strong Irish Sea fleet, which include four new vessels that were built in Spain and introduced onto two of their routes since 2008.

Lead-ship of the four 120-trailer capacity vessels, Clipper Point was followed by Clipper Panorama on the Warrenpoint route. The Clipper Pace and the final unit of the quartet, Clipper Pennant, serve on the Liverpool route. The new Dublin-Heysham route will increase the total number of all Seatruck route sailings to 80 each week.

Published in Ferry

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.