24th December 2020
The East Antrim Boat Club dinghy fleet prepare for a start at Larne Harbour and in the background (left) is MPI Resolution, the world s first purpose-built vessel for installing offshore wind turbines currently based in Larne
Seventeen single-handers took advantage of a favourable day on Sunday last (20th) to hold a Christmas Regatta at East Antrim Boat Club on Larne Lough before the shut down in Northern Ireland on Boxing Day.
The fleet consisted of two Optimists and a Topper racing together, nine Laser Radials, four Laser 4.7s and an Aero starting as a group.
The fleet raced in Larne Harbour, currently the base for MPI Resolution, the world s first purpose-built vessel for installing offshore wind turbines that is pictured top and as Afloat reported previously here.
More than half a century before Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings made her home in the remote hamlet of Cross Creek in southeastern Alachua County, Joseph B. Blake became the first known white settler to live there. Joseph was the older brother of Dempsey Blake, Jay Whitworth’s great-great-grandfather.
Whitworth began tracing his Cross Creek roots after his mother, Hilda Avant Whitworth, died in 1994. While preparing his mother’s house for sale, Whitworth searched through an old cedar chest where his mother kept family photos.
“It turned into an archaeological dig the further I went down,” Whitworth recalled. “I found items I did not know or forgot existed. In the lower level of the chest were the photos and stereograph cards of our ancestors from the Creek and Gainesville, along with various scenes of the area.”