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Displaying items by tag: Fisheries patrol

#RiverClass – Making a call to Dublin Port today is a UK Royal Navy ‘River’ patrol class vessel that is to remain in the capital for a three-day visit, writes Jehan Ashmore.

HMS Severn is one of the River class quartet and represents the second built by Vosper Thornycroft at their Woolston yard. The patrol ship is deployed up to 200 miles offshore in the Atlantic. This is to ensure that fishing boats and trawlers stick to UK and EU fisheries laws.

The OPV can also be used from fire-fighting to disaster relief operations.

Likewise of two of her sisters HMS Tyne and HMS Mersey each have a crew of about 45 sailors. The crew work at least 275 days a year at sea to enforce internationally agreed fishing qoutas.

The River class have a 5,500 nautical mile range and have a speed of 20 knots. They are equipped with two gun weapons systems.

As for the final unit of the quartet, HMS Clyde operates around the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.

Published in Naval Visits

William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago