Commodore Bulletin 17 - 120425
Published 13:01 on 12 Apr 2025
Well members, we have been open for about 5 weeks now and the club has really come to life quickly. It is great to see so many boats back on the foreshore (which looks amazing due to the team who worked tirelessly over the winter and before the start of the season to get it ready), as well as everyone who attended the working party to get the club opened. A huge thanks to everyone who has been involved!
Let's start with an easy one. Everyone did an incredible job of removing their boats this year and we only had one boat abandoned over the winter. This is an aluminum fishing boat with a tender and we have been unable to track down the owner. We will be sending out another email to all of last year's members but we are now treating this as abandoned and will be enacting club policy on this matter. The boat will be moved towards the gate whilst we initiate this and arrange disposal / resale. Richie will be doing a foreshore walk the next few weeks to ensure all boats this year are displaying stickers etc.
Another quick one is to remind members that over the last 3 months, ENP have been holding the water levels abnormally low due to maintenance work within their network. When this has happened before historically, the next good fall of rain does result in rapidly increasing water levels so please ensure that your boats are made secure to avoid any damage to your boat, other people's boats or accidental release into the lake.
Hot off the press (well from this week's committee meeting) is that we are planning to run another Multihull taster session this year. The club has a small multihull fleet and we are keen to give people the opportunity to have a go at this with a gradual plan of slowly increasing the Catamaran participation. Watch this space but if you would be interested in a half day with an experienced Catamaran helm to experience this, please let us know.
We will be piloting a new service this year to our members as a little add value. A number of people have asked about club merchandise but we have avoided this as it tends to need a lot of club capital tied up as stock and then you get the odd sizes left at the end that you cannot sell so we are approaching this a bit differently. We have secured the services of a local (member) who has a high-quality embroidery machine which can embroider our logo onto a wide range of clothes. Therefore, we will be starting with a logo your own item service. For a fixed price of £5.50 you can have the club logo put on an item of clothing. If you would like your name, boat and sail number embordered on the other side this can also be done for an additional £5.50. I will pop a full article about this later in the week but for now if you have a nice polo shirt, fleece or hoodie you would like the club logo on, please get it out ready. This is much cheaper that having to buy a logod item of clothing as you are paying for the embroidery only.
Another one to watch this space is regarding guest / members wi-fi in the club house. We have now had fast fibre installed (at long last!) which has removed our costly 4g system. This now runs the EPOS systems, the weather station and the web cams. We are also able to publish a guest wifi that will support 13 concurrent users. We are just checking our legal limitation and how inappropriate content is filtered. Once we are happy as a club that we are covered we will release this to the membership via a chalkboard in the club house.
We have had a great start to the year regarding training with a PB2 course completed by a number of our members. We have also run our first Introduction to Race Officer Training which we had a great turnout to. Over the last few years, we have really focused on our Powerboat Training to ensure we have enough qualified RIB drivers and this has allowed us to update our powered craft policy. This has been a hugely successful program and our approach has been well supported. Our next focus is to bring members up to speed with how to run club racing from the bridge. As you may be aware, our club racing in a very low key and informal affair therefore the racers are very forgiving and supportive to new race officers. Our long term plan is to have club members confident and skilled to run club racing and them maybe a few may like to progress to RYA Regional Race Officer standard and assist with the running of our open evens. At present we only have a very small handful of people who can run opens and we must look at a long term strategy to change this.
With this in mind we have two more training events to introduce you to becoming race officers as follows:
Basic principles of Race Officer this session will guide members thought the clubs race bridge and then take you through the flag sequencing, start procedure, OCS procedures and shortened course process. An overview of how to finish both handicap racing and pursuits will give you everything you need to start supporting club racing. This is being ran by Gary Darch on Saturday 26th April
Supporting club and class opens Running and managing either a club open or a visiting class open is a big step up from club racing. With a need to increase our capability in this area, this course will start someone with a basic understanding of Race Officer craft to initially support opens as an Assistant Race Officer and to hopefully grow your skills forward. This is being ran by Ken Hull on Saturday 31st May
We have a number of Open events coming up with the first being our 2 day Easter Regatta. This is a great weekend at the club with a BBQ on the Saturday night and 2 days of racing. We have a number of visitors joining us (some from Scotland in Wasp low riders) so it is guaranteed to be a great weekend,. Whether you are a seasoned racer or new to it, it will be a great weekend and if racing is not your thing, there will be a great buzz at the club so why not join us for a BBQ or just have a nice leisure sail. There will be a safety boat out both days and I would like to thank the safety boat teams this year who have immediately embraced the new guidelines whereby the safety boat is out on the water from 10:30 until 16:00 for all club members whether they are racing or not. If you would like to book a place at the regatta or just a BBQ meal, take a look here.
We have just carried out an analysis of our Q1 membership which shows a number of trends. We appear to have slightly less boat parking spaces booked this year and a number of family memberships have changed from 2 adults sailing to 1 adult which is very unusual. We have stripped out the fishing memberships so we could see the impact of Paddle Members now doing duties (which appears to have had little to no impact on numbers in that section). I have just completed a comparison of other clubs to look at how much memberships cost and what benefits members get and what activities clubs ask them to do (such as duties). As a general rule we are closely aligned to most clubs and sit in the low to mid point for Membership Costs and very aligned on duties. We will continue to monitor this and we have a number of learnings from this benchmarking exercise to consider as a committee.
Thats about everything for this month apart from saying that if you have not signed up for your duties, please do so in the next few weeks. Steve has run a report of members vs duties and we have a significant number of people who are yet to sign up. Steve will be contacting people individually in the next few weeks so if don't want a phone call I would encourage you to get them in ASAP.
Have a great time out on the water and dont forget to say Hi!
Rob Sloggett
Commodore
Last updated 15:47 on 27 November 2025