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Displaying items by tag: August

#Rowing: The Afloat Rowers of the Month for August are Margaret Cremen and Aoife Casey. The Ireland double finished seventh at the World Rowing Junior Championships. The Lee/Skibbereen duo reached the semi-finals in Trakai, Lithuania, but while they could not make the top six they were impressive winners of the B Final, where France tested them. Amongst the countries which did not reach the last 12 were Australia, New Zealand, the United States and China. Twenty-eight countries competed in this discipline.  

 Cremen and Casey had taken a silver medal at the European Junior Championships in Germany in May. It was another highlight of an exceptional season. Ireland underage crews have been part of the general rise: so far they have taken two medals at the World Under-23 Championships and five at the Coupe de la Jeunesse, a European junior tournament.

Rower of the Month awards: The judging panel is made up of Liam Gorman, rowing correspondent of The Irish Times, and David O'Brien, editor of Afloat magazine. Monthly awards for achievements during the year will appear on afloat.ie. Keep a monthly eye on progress and watch our 2017 champions list grow.

Published in Rower of Month

#Rowers of the Month: The Afloat Rowers of the Month for August are the Ireland junior quadruple scull which won two gold medals at the Coupe de la Jeunesse in Szeged in Hungary. In early September, the senior team would make their mark at the World Championships, but in August it was the juniors which came away with a five-medal haul. The junior women’s double of Aoife Casey and Emily Hegarty took silver on Saturday and Sunday and single sculler Dervla Forde took bronze on the Sunday. But the most successful crew was the junior men’s quadruple of  Colm Hennessy, Eoghan Whittle, Patrick Munnelly and Andrew Goff. They had also taken gold at the 2014 Coupe.

 Rower of the Month awards: The judging panel is made up of Liam Gorman, rowing correspondent of The Irish Times and David O'Brien, Editor of Afloat magazine. Monthly awards for achievements during the year will appear on afloat.ie and the overall national award will be presented to the person or crew who, in the judges' opinion, achieved the most notable results in, or made the most significant contribution to rowing during 2015. Keep a monthly eye on progress and watch our 2015 champions list grow.

Published in Rowing

#ROWING: The Afloat Rowers of the Month for August are Leonora Kennedy and Monika Dukarska. The Enniskillen woman, who had rowed and won medals with Britain, and her Killorglin teammate only began to work together earlier this summer, yet they formed a women’s double which finished a creditable 10th at the World Rowing Championships in Chungju in Korea. As preparations for the new season begin, this crew gives hope that Ireland rowing may begin to gather momentum again on the world stage.

Rower of the Month awards: The judging panel is made up of Liam Gorman, rowing correspondent of The Irish Times and David O'Brien, Editor of Afloat magazine. Monthly awards for achievements during the year will appear on afloat.ie and the overall national award will be presented to the person or crew who, in the judges' opinion, achieved the most notable results in, or made the most significant contribution to rowing during 2013. Keep a monthly eye on progress and watch our 2013 champions list grow.

Published in Rowing
Dun Laoghaire will play host to two new and exciting events this coming August.
The first annual Dublin Bay Taste & Music Fest takes place at the Peoples' Park from 26-28 August.
Pitched as a 'back to basics' celebration of Ireland's culinary heritage, the weekend will feature a 'boulevard' of chefs doing live demonstrations using the finest of local ingredients - as well as guest chefs from San Francisco providing the best of US west coast cooking.
Earlier in the month, on 1 August the inaugural DLR Bay 10k road race kicks off near Dun Laoghaire DART station.
The runners will follow a route that takes in Seapoint, Monkstown, Sallynogging, Glenageary, Sandcove and Glasthule.
For more details visit www.dlrbay10k.ie.

Dun Laoghaire will play host to two new and exciting events this coming August.

The first annual Dublin Bay Taste & Music Fest takes place at the Peoples' Park from 26-28 August.

Pitched as a 'back to basics' celebration of Ireland's culinary heritage, the weekend will feature a 'boulevard' of chefs doing live demonstrations using the finest of local ingredients - as well as guest chefs from San Francisco providing the best of US west coast cooking.

Earlier in the month, on 1 August the inaugural DLR Bay 10k road race kicks off near Dun Laoghaire DART station.

The runners will follow a route that takes in Seapoint, Monkstown, Sallynoggin, Glenageary, Sandycove and Glasthule.

For more details visit www.dlrbay10k.ie.

Published in Dublin Bay

Ireland's Trading Ketch Ilen

The Ilen is the last of Ireland’s traditional wooden sailing ships.

Designed by Limerick man Conor O’Brien and built in Baltimore in 1926, she was delivered by Munster men to the Falkland Islands where she served valiantly for seventy years, enduring and enjoying the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties.

Returned now to Ireland and given a new breath of life, Ilen may be described as the last of Ireland’s timber-built ocean-going sailing ships, yet at a mere 56ft, it is capable of visiting most of the small harbours of Ireland.

Wooden Sailing Ship Ilen FAQs

The Ilen is the last of Ireland’s traditional wooden sailing ships.

The Ilen was designed by Conor O’Brien, the first Irish man to circumnavigate the world.

Ilen is named for the West Cork River which flows to the sea at Baltimore, her home port.

The Ilen was built by Baltimore Sea Fisheries School, West Cork in 1926. Tom Moynihan was foreman.

Ilen's wood construction is of oak ribs and planks of larch.

As-built initially, she is 56 feet in length overall with a beam of 14 feet and a displacement of 45 tonnes.

Conor O’Brien set sail in August 1926 with two Cadogan cousins from Cape Clear in West Cork, arriving at Port Stanley in January 1927 and handed it over to the new owners.

The Ilen was delivered to the Falkland Islands Company, in exchange for £1,500.

Ilen served for over 70 years as a cargo ship and a ferry in the Falkland Islands, enduring and enjoying the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties. She stayed in service until the early 1990s.

Limerick sailor Gary McMahon and his team located Ilen. MacMahon started looking for her in 1996 and went out to the Falklands and struck a deal with the owner to bring her back to Ireland.

After a lifetime of hard work in the Falklands, Ilen required a ground-up rebuild.

A Russian cargo ship transported her back on a 12,000-mile trip from the Southern Oceans to Dublin. The Ilen was discharged at the Port of Dublin 1997, after an absence from Ireland of 70 years.

It was a collaboration between the Ilen Project in Limerick and Hegarty’s Boatyard in Old Court, near Skibbereen. Much of the heavy lifting, of frames, planking, deadwood & backbone, knees, floors, shelves and stringers, deck beams, and carlins, was done in Hegarty’s. The generally lighter work of preparing sole, bulkheads, deck‐houses fixed furniture, fixtures & fittings, deck fittings, machinery, systems, tanks, spar making and rigging is being done at the Ilen boat building school in Limerick.

Ten years. The boat was much the worse for wear when it returned to West Cork in May 1998, and it remained dormant for ten years before the start of a decade-long restoration.

Ilen now serves as a community floating classroom and cargo vessel – visiting 23 ports in 2019 and making a transatlantic crossing to Greenland as part of a relationship-building project to link youth in Limerick City with youth in Nuuk, west Greenland.

At a mere 56ft, Ilen is capable of visiting most of the small harbours of Ireland.

©Afloat 2020