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Dublin Bay Sailing Club Expects to Announce Start Date for Summer Season This Week

2nd May 2021
DBSC Commodore Ann Kirwan has been out on the Dublin Bay race track at the weekend inspecting the newly laid race marks ('J' or 'Asgard' mark pictured) for its forthcoming summer season
DBSC Commodore Ann Kirwan has been out on the Dublin Bay race track at the weekend inspecting the newly laid race marks ('J' or 'Asgard' mark pictured) for the club's forthcoming summer season Credit: Eddie Totterdell

139 yachts and dinghies are now signed up for the Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) Summer Season.

Following the Government announcement of the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, the club is expecting to hear news of when club training and racing can start this week.

The country's biggest sailing league on Dublin Bay had been targeting a return on May 4th. While this is not confirmed, DBSC Commodore Ann Kirwan told Afloat the club is awaiting "guidance" but "would be hopeful for a return to our full racing programme pretty soon". 

As sailing has been described as a low-risk outdoor no-contact sport with little difference in the sport between training and competition modes, more clarity has been requested on the resumption date for yacht racing currently given as June 7th.

Racing in DBSC's summer series on Dublin BayRacing in DBSC's summer series on Dublin Bay

DBSC's Hon Sec Chris Moore said the club expected to "receive confirmation of a start date on Tuesday" (May 3rd). 

Meanwhile, DBSC has laid its marks, prepared courses and made arrangements for an immediate start to its AIB sponsored season that traditionally begins in the last week of April for a fleet of up to 200 boats and 1200 sailors on the capital's waters. "We're ready to go whenever", Kirwan said.

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Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.