Sailing on Saturday with WM Nixon
The Resurgent Glen Keelboat & Why Local One Design Sailing Classes Have Never Been More Relevant
17th July 2021 W M Nixon
The cherished local One-Design classes of Ireland have never been more relevant than they are now, in these crazy times of soaring-graph numbers when local is good. The expectation of staying local, while making do with fairly modest socialising and…
In Dun Laoghaire Harbour, the Sailing Show Goes On As the Ghost of the VDLR Haunts Foggy Dublin Bay
10th July 2021 W M Nixon
It has been said here before, but it's worth saying again – on Thursday evenings in normal times in summer, the Dublin Bay Sailing Club programme is so popular that the fleet out racing would be considered a splendid turnout…
It's a serious-looking big poster that they've had newly-displayed for the past three days on Howth Yacht Club's gable wall. But then, the prospect of Rob Dickson of Howth and Sean Waddilove of Skerries representing Ireland in the Tokyo Olympics…
The National YC's Dun Laoghaire to Dingle Race of Wednesday, June 9th – just two days after such things became permissible on June 7th - may have been hailed here as "a spectacular pillar event to launch the 2021 Irish…
Carmel Winkelmann of Dun Laoghaire, who has died in her 93rd year, was a universe, a force of nature, and an indefatigable and resilient optimist who carved her own unique course through Irish sailing at every level for sixty years…
When the Royal Cork Yacht Club was undergoing one of its infusions of new life and ideas during the early 1840s in order to keep up the necessary levels of vitality in a remarkable organisation which dates back to the…
National Yacht Club's Dun Laoghaire to Dingle Race is Clarion Call for Ireland's 2021 Sailing Season
5th June 2021 W M Nixon
Way back whenever, as each wave of COVID seemed to sweep over its predecessor with a power worthy of Aileens herself, the incurable optimists among Ireland's sailors continued to hope that by some miracle we'd have reached a stage on…
While there may have been nothing exactly like the current schedule-wrecking Pandemic before, in times past - nationally and internationally - we've come through comparable catastrophes. And enough of previous generations have survived to tell the tale and provide guidance…
"Sailing is a lifestyle activity which evolves as an expression of a vehicle sport afloat". There you go. So now you know. And please note that it's "lifestyle" and not "lifetime", though the latter also applies. Yet you were thinking…
Time was when the question of whether the 2020-Olympics-in-2021 should or should not be staged would have been described as the Elephant in the Room, suggesting the presence of an imponderable so large and unthinkable that the sanity-seeking majority of…
Sailing in Dublin Bay Area in 2021 Will Be Resuming on a "Gently Does It" Basis
8th May 2021 W M Nixon
The welcome announcement that the National Yacht Club's biennial 280-mile Dun Laoghaire to Dingle Race 2021 will be going ahead on Wednesday, June 9th, is encouraging. But it should not be seen as a clarion call to get the 2021…
For this week's Sailing on Saturday we take a look back eight years when WM Nixon cruised from Ireland to the Outer Hebrides in the 36-foot vintage restored sloop Ainmara #hebrides – August is almost upon us. The heat has…
The Olympic Flame is now well into its progression through Japan, on a Marathon of Marathons which is seeing runners of every shape and size and type carry it into all of the 47 Prefectures which make up that most…
Welcome to Nautical Limbo Land. This weekend may see the annual start-of-season lift-ins – with masked-up socially-distanced protocols - at the Dun Laoghaire Motor Yacht Club, the National YC, and the Royal St George Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire. But…
How quickly can we hope to return to the carefree style of sailing sociability which reflects the mood displayed above, as seen in the officially-accredited Sporting & Cultural Mission from Howth Yacht Club on its traditional biennial visit to the…
The impression conveyed in the image above of good-humoured sport afloat at the first regatta from the new harbour of Kingstown on July 22nd 1828 is so lively that today we easily forgive the relatively unskilled work of the artist,…
