Take it to the River! Huntingdon Radio Yacht Club’s event on 17 August
While having a post racing beer following our DF95 Twilight series a few weeks ago, Andy Johnson, the club training officer suggested
“why don’t we have an afternoon sailing on the River Great Ouse from St Ives Quay, we could have a jolly time on the river for our members, and at £0.50p a go, raise some money for our favourite charity, the RNLI.
And so the seed was sewn.
A plan was formulated, members press ganged (they didn’t need much pressing) into joining in, and the following few weeks the cogs in the wheels to set the thing in motion began
We had to get the ok from the Environment Agency, which they were very happy to help, the St Ives Electric Riverboat Co have a pontoon at river level which we could launch from, and a local river cruiser provided “recovery from weed” services on his tender, (two-way radio was a god send) he was very busy !!!
After our normal Saturday mornings racing, our marks were loaded into a car and taken to the local marina, here they were loaded into a boat, and along with 5 skippers and 5 boats, all were motored upstream to the Quay, perimeter marks to keep the cruisers at bay were dropped and a simple upwind/downwind course was laid for any racing that may take place.
The crowds had already gathered on the Quayside and soon we were busy giving instruction, and demonstrations on sailing were given throughout the afternoon, with a few races thrown in for good measure, its amazing how much attention our starting machine attracts people’s attention.
With Martin Brooking & Alan “Cookie” Cooke on front of house, Andy Baldock & Andy Johnson being first line “let me show you how this works” team, and everyone else either sailing or also passing a controller onto a willing member of the public.
To everyone else, Steve “The Cake” Brown, Dave Preston, Ben Harker, Mike Henton, Andy Wa (photo’s) , Ben Wallace & Hayden Wallace (our youngest member at age 11) who was showing of his skills to his age group and older.
It did get very busy !
So, some stats from the day :-
Our web site received over 100 hits yesterday from QR code scans,
Our RNLI collection box collected £58.96
I think we all had a great afternoon in the sunshine, and also for two and a half hours, bought some extra smiles to the Quay, we are a busy club generally, but this was great fun for all the members present, and all agreed it was a fantastic way to spend the afternoon, the weather was a very pleasant 24 degrees, which also made the day something very special.
The general plan for the day was to show the public our sport, and hopefully pick up a few members along the way, we have one new member from the pre-event promotional activity, the next member to join will be club member number 40!!
Of course a few of us had to end the day for a wash up, and a couple of cold ones went down a treat.