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Displaying items by tag: Larger Third Vessel

#LargerVessel – A larger third Seatruck Ferries ro-ro vessel will be added to the Dublin-Liverpool route today.

The current vessel, Clipper Ranger will be replaced by the larger and faster P series vessel, Seatruck Pace which will almost double the freight capacity with space for 110 trailers per sailing.

As reported on Afloat, Clipper Ranger was only added in mid-November 2015 but has already attracted significant flows of new traffic since its introduction.

The deployment of Seatruck Pace, a proven P series vessel as the third vessel to run alongside a pair of larger FSG vessels will ensure Seatruck offer three sailings daily in each direction to cope with continued growth on the central Irish Sea route.

The vessel switch is in direct response to demand and feedback from Seatruck customers and this has led to that tailored sailings schedule to reflect changing needs of the Irish market. Crucially it will add further capacity during the busy midweek period.

The 1,830 lane metre capacity Seatruck Pace will bring speed, schedule reliability, free height and even faster turnaround times in port. Drivers will now have single berth en-suite cabins and comfortable lounge area. In addition the ship benefits from a ramp interface to the lower hold in place of a lift.

Driver shortages are causing operators to reassess their traditional accompanied method. Seatruck Ferries believes in a switch to greater volumes of unaccompanied movements from ports, which reduces road mileage compared with the transit through Wales or Scotland.

As economic conditions improve, this addition is the next stage in Seatruck Ferries’ strategic development plan and complements the operators existing Warrenpoint-Heysham and Dublin-Heysham services.

Published in Ferry

The Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) Information

The creation of the Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) began in a very low key way in the autumn of 2002 with an exploratory meeting between Denis Kiely, Jim Donegan and Fintan Cairns in the Granville Hotel in Waterford, and the first conference was held in February 2003 in Kilkenny.

While numbers of cruiser-racers were large, their specific locations were widespread, but there was simply no denying the numerical strength and majority power of the Cork-Dublin axis. To get what was then a very novel concept up and running, this strength of numbers had to be acknowledged, and the first National Championship in 2003 reflected this, as it was staged in Howth.

ICRA was run by a dedicated group of volunteers each of whom brought their special talents to the organisation. Jim Donegan, the elder statesman, was so much more interested in the wellbeing of the new organisation than in personal advancement that he insisted on Fintan Cairns being the first Commodore, while the distinguished Cork sailor was more than content to be Vice Commodore.

ICRA National Championships

Initially, the highlight of the ICRA season was the National Championship, which is essentially self-limiting, as it is restricted to boats which have or would be eligible for an IRC Rating. Boats not actually rated but eligible were catered for by ICRA’s ace number-cruncher Denis Kiely, who took Ireland’s long-established native rating system ECHO to new heights, thereby providing for extra entries which brought fleet numbers at most annual national championships to comfortably above the hundred mark, particularly at the height of the boom years. 

ICRA Boat of the Year (Winners 2004-2019)