Tuesday, 7 November 2006

Titanic museum barges in to Belfast

BBC:

With the Titanic festival only six months away, one charity is set to create the first maritime museum in the Titanic Quarter and, unusually, it will be built inside a Dutch barge.

The MV Confiance arrived in Belfast on Friday after Derek Booker, chair of Lagan Legacy, bought the boat for £100,000.

While there were a few hairy moments for skipper Alan Pratt, his nerves remained calm at the helm as he gently steered her through the weirs of the River Lagan.

The crew sailed the vessel from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, although a trip they thought would take only a few days ended up taking a month.

Rough seas and bad weather forced them to call at a number of ports, all together they say they waited 24 days, only spending six days at sea.

The boat now sits, moored outside the Waterfront Hall, where it will remain until £600,000 worth of restoration begins.

It will become a floating heritage centre and house the Lagan Legacy's collection of filmed and recorded interviews with former shipyard workers, dockers and mariners.