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Displaying items by tag: Strangford Ferry

Plans to increase fares for passengers on the Strangford Ferry by as much as 32 per cent have provoked a strong reaction, as Belfast Live reports.

The RORO ferry operated by Northern Ireland’s Department for Infrastructure provides a crucial link across the Strangford Narrows between the village of Strangford and the town of Portaferry in Co Down.

But Stormont plans to raise fares across single and multi-journey tickets could see regular users of the ferry link paying an extra £400 a year.

The move has prompted a letter of objection from Ards and North Down Borough Council, with the increase described as “shocking” by one councillor.

Another councillor — the SDLP’s Joe Boyle, who forwarded the motion — argues that any price rise should be based on the prevailing rate of inflation, which in the UK is 3.9 per cent.

“Whilst it is accepted there has not been an increase in some years, for many of those years it has been seen as quite expensive. But a 30 to 32 percent increase, while many are still finding things difficult, is unacceptable,” Boyle says.

Belfast Live has more on the story HERE.

Published in Ferry

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.