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Displaying items by tag: Weitse Buwalda

#CORK HARBOUR - Amateur birdwatchers in Cork were in a tizzy last week over the sighting of what appeared to be two penguins floating on an 'ice floe' near Crosshaven, the Cork Independent reports.

The mystery was answered at 'press conference' in popular local haunt Cronin's Bar, where Weitse Buwalda of Salve Marina in Crosshaven – and a friend of Afloat - confirmed that the plastic penguins had been "captured" in the marina before Christmas.

“They were fouling up the place so we shoved them out there on a bit of polystyrene to keep the place clean,” he said with tongue firmly in cheek.

The sightings had sparked much debate among locals, with concerns that the Antarctic avians had broken out of nearby Fota Island Wildlife Park - though this was denied by park officials, who said their full penguin complement was accounted for.

It's the second time in six months that Cork's penguins have gone viral on the internet, following the video of the 'lonely penguin' at Fota Island last July, which shows the little one abandoned by his family at dinner time:

The Cork Independent has more on the story HERE.

Published in Cork Harbour

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.