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Displaying items by tag: Oyster World Rally

#Oyster - A fleet of 27 yachts from North America, South Africa and Western Europe - including Ireland - will take part in the 2013 Oyster World Rally, which sets off from Antigua in the West Indies tomorrow (6 January).

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the sailing brand, the launch from Nelson's Dockyard will mark the start of a "16-month odyssey of endless adventure" that will take the fleet all the way round the world via more than 30 ports of call.

After passing through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific, the rally will stop at the the Galapagos Islands, Marquesas, Tahiti, Bora Bora and Moorea.

From there the fleet will head to the Great Barrier Reef, round the top of Australia, partying in Bali and heading west for Cape Town in time for next Christmas, then on to Brazil for next year's carnival, before joining up for a final grand party with the Oyster Caribbean Regatta in April 2014.

And the Irish will be in the thick of the action, via the Oyster 885 'Lush' owned by Formula 1 pundit and sailing convert Eddie Jordan.

Oyster World Rally event manager Debbie Johnson said: “It is very exciting to finally be in Antigua getting ready for the start.

"So many sailors dream of sailing around the world and the camaraderie throughout the fleet is just fantastic."

Follow the progress of the fleet as the rally gets under way via the official website HERE.

Published in Sailing Events

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.