Wexford

Contacts:
Wexford Harbour Boat Club +353 (0)5 3912 2039

There has been a very busy harbour at Wexford for centuries and has been used variously for commercial trade, fishing and, for a period, privateering, (polite word for pirates) on English ships operating on the other side of the St Georges Channel. Wexford has been involved in conflict throughout the centuries against anyone who thought they had a right to govern them either from Dublin or Westminster and have suffered several "sackings" through the ages.

Numerous attempts have been made by various Bodies to improve the access to the harbour but some of those have ended up making the situation worse rather than better. At one stage land reclamation north of Rosslare Point stretched out as far as the ruins which can still be seen on the starboard hand as you navigate the buoyed channel through the bar.

The training walls pushing out into the bay from the harbour were part of one of the attempts to improve the situation hoping to concentrate the outfall from the hinterland and scour a channel but over the years they were allowed to fall into disrepair and lost their effectiveness. Plans are afoot to rebuild the South training wall back above MHWS; at the moment that wall is under water at high tide and needs to be watched out for.

It has to be said that there were vested interests in keeping the access to the harbour difficult; the merchants had invested in shallow draft boats and if the harbour were to be made more accessible they would find themselves in competition with deep draft bottoms and, during the time of the privateering, the shallow passage protected them from the "big guns" of the English Fleet.

We are left today with a viable dock and harbour with an unviable entrance and there is virtually no cargo trade and only a small fleet of vessels harvesting mussels and other shell fish. There are no organised facilities for visiting yachtsmen apart from those offered by the Wexford Boat and Tennis Club, and their club house is the wrong side of the bridge spanning the harbour for any boat with a mast.

This is a pity because Wexford would be a delightful place to visit, especially after a crossing from England; it has all the facilities of a vibrant county town with plenty of shops, restaurants and quality pubs. As it is, as a visitor, you can only get in sensibly during the last two hours of the flood and then only in off shore winds and you don't need those sorts of restrictions at the end of a longish crossing of the St Georges Channel. Add to that, outbound you are going to have to work out the gamble of whether to peg the rising tide or risk going down on the ebb.

For comprehensive information about the harbour you must take a look at the web site:-

http://www.wexfordharbour.info/

This has the most recent information on the navigation in through the channel along with pages and pages of interest about Wexford. You must also look at their Facebook page where you will see much imagery of recent changes to the channel.

https://www.facebook.com/wexfordharbour.info?ref=stream

It is noticeable that the only buoyage shown on Admiralty charts is the Bar Buoy itself and that is because the channel buoyage has to be constantly moved by the diligent members of the Wexford BC. The soundings on the UKHO charts are woefully out of date being derived from mid Twentieth Century surveys, the most recent one being 1951; this is most obvious when you consider that the present day channel traverses banks which are marked as drying more than a meter above LAT.

For those reasons it is essential that you look at the two websites above; they are well maintained and contain massive amounts of valuable information to be researched in the planning stages of your trip

It is really up to the individual whether to call in here on an Irish Cruise; you can see it as a challenge to be taken or a challenge to be avoided; if you take the challenge make sure you have taken the most recent advice from the Wexford Boat Club or from the HM at Rosslare Harbour. You will also need a reliable echo sounder, a reliable engine and brass cojones.