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Displaying items by tag: Irish lights marine depot Dun Laoghaire

#FORMER IRISH LIGHTS TENDER -With the Guardian 8 preparing to set sail from her builders homeport of Arklow this month, as previously reported on Afloat.ie, her owners Gardline Marine Services also operate a former Commissioners of Irish Lights tender, writes Jehan Ashmore.

The Great Yarmouth based company operate a multi-purpose fleet which includes the survey vessel Ocean Seeker (PHOTO). She was a familiar sight as the ILV Granuaile (1970/1,943grt) while serving for three decades from the Irish Lights marine depot in Dun Laoghaire Harbour.

Built by Fergusan Brothers of Port Glasgow, she was the last traditional tender for CIL in that her working deck was positioned forward. Apart from the short career of the Gray Seal, the 2000 built successor ILV Granuaile (the third to carry the name of the Mayo pirate queen) was the first custom built tender for CIL to introduce a radical design with an aft end work deck.

Published in Lighthouses

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.