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Displaying items by tag: New £10m roro ramp

#FerryNews - Heysham Port in recent weeks has had a new ro-ro ramp linkspan installed bringing to three berthing facilities serving the growing Irish Sea trade through the Lancashire port, writes Jehan Ashmore.

The £10m investment by the Peel Ports operated harbour has created a dedicated loading berth and allows a much greater schedule reliability for chief customer Seatruck Ferries and Stena Line.

The ramp linkspan constructed in the Netherlands was towed to the port. At close to 100m long, the ramp is designed to deal with the large 10m rise and fall in tide that is experienced at Heysham.

Seatruck has routes to Warrenpoint, Co. Down and Dublin Port. A twice daily service is operated to Warrenpoint and single sailing to the Irish capital. Together three freight-ferries operate these routes. They are Seatruck Panorama, Clipper Pennant and Seatruck Pace which alone serves the Dublin route.

Rivals, Stena Line operate to Belfast Port, using chartered tonnage from Seatruck. The ro-ro freight ferry on this second of the Heysham-Northern Ireland routes is served by Stena Performer. 

According to Seatruck, the funding in Heysham Port, will also see a new pontoon built to support offshore crew transfer vessels. In addition the construction of a new port entrance and various improvements to the port IT and terminal operating systems.

A third port user, Isle of Man Steam Packet operate a passenger and freight service to Douglas. This year-round route is the main service link between the UK and the island.

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)