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Displaying items by tag: Upper River Lee

Writing to Afloat.ie, reader Joan Twomey bemoans the lack of attention on the sorry status of salmon on the upper River Lee

It is heartening to read about so much EU and Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) collaboration regarding Greenland salmon (Afloat.ie, 2 November 2023).

I wonder if they could do something about the environmental catastrophic actions of our own ESB semi-State body over the last 50-plus years on our Irish salmon on the upper Lee River catchment area.

Salmon are now practically extinct in this area — and in Lough Allua, the Bealaphadeen Stream and surrounding streams and rivers. Nothing is being said about this and very little is being done.

The number of salmon getting past the dams is dismal, if the real numbers were ever revealed — from being able to catch salmon in your hands there were so many, to locals not seeing a single salmon in decades.

Yours sincerely,
Joan Twomey
Ballingeary, Co Cork

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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.