A photographic look back at some of the ferries which have operated to or within Northern Ireland, including those which operated both for present operators and those which no longer exist. Part 4 focuses on the Isle of Man Steam Packet and Seacat.
The 2nd of Hoverspeed’s 5 74m “Seacat” car carrying catamarans was built by International Catamarans (InCat) in Australia and launched as Hoverspeed France on April 28th 1990.  Despite being hull number 26, she was launched some months before hull 23 (Seacat Tasmania), but 3 months after hull 25 (Hoverspeed Great Britain).  All 5 of these “SeaCat” vessels where built to the same “Mark 1” design and specification, with a further 4 built afterwards for other operators to modified specifications.  4 out of the 5 original 74m long Seacat’s would operate from Belfast over the years, with the only craft never to operate from the port being that launched as Seacat Tasmania. InCat 026, in common with the other original Hoverspeed ‘SeaCat’s’ was well-travelled over the years.  While initially she operated on Hoverspeed’s own English Channel services from July 1991, she was chartered out to Sardinia Express (and renamed Sardegna Express) the following June.  However, that charter … Read more
New ferries added The following vessel profiles have had technical data, photographs, and some history added: Seacat Scotland Seacat Danmark The Seacat Isle of Man/Snaefell and Hoverspeed Great Britain pages should be finished in the coming week. Changes to existing ferry posts The following vessel profiles have had material added or changed European Causeway/European Highlander (new photographs added and reformatted with headings) Stena Superfast VII/Stena Superfast VIII (reformatted, added headings, and updated to reflect the introduction of Stena Superfast X) Changes to pages and navigation Ferry routes and operators page rewritten due to a formatting issue on some browsers. New category added “NI Ferry Profiles (current)” and added to menu (filed under “The NI Ferry Fleet” to allow easier navigation to current ship profiles. Some minor changes to formatting have also been made to a number of the posts and pages on the site so that they appear better with … Read more
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