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Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: travelhoist

With just over three weeks til the clocks go forward and with the smell of antifouling in the air at Dun Laoghaire Harbour, it can only mean one thing; the Irish summer boating season is just round the corner. Boatyards around the country are getting busy in anticipation of a great 2016 season. Yesterday and today, both the Howth and Dun Laoghaire RNLI Lifeboats are being lifted on MGM Boatyard's 50–ton travel hoist (the only such hoist in Dublin Bay) for maintenance and service work that includes antifouling and anode changing.

 MGM Boats offer a wide range of boatyard services including lifting, pressure washing, block off and launching. 

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.