Welcome to 2017 - FYC's 60th Jubilee Sailing season!
The daffodils are out so it must be time for the dafties to start sailing in the iceberg strewn Firth of Forth!
Our sailing calendar is now published here. You can also easily add this to your personal phone calendar along with David Banks' Tides and Sun Calendar which is very handy.
Also emailed to members is a summary of the whole year which allows you to see at a glance what rescue boat duties you are assigned. (All members are asked to help out and it is a great way to gain experience driving the RIB and understanding racing a bit better). If you can look ahead and take a note of when you are on duty and, if necessary, start an email conversation about swapping duties if the dates do not suit. This summary will become outdated as soon as changes are made so please don't refer back to it in the future, the google calendar will be the master copy.
So our season kicks off with a race on Saturday 8th April, part of the Early Bird Series.
Our first funsail is the day afterwards on Sunday 9th.
Junior club starts on Friday 14th April.
The finer points of the yacht calendar are being worked on, but I can update you on the main events. There has been no official notification of crane in date, but looking at the tides it's fair to assume Saturday 29th April will be the date.
Our Jubilee Regatta will be on the 24th / 25th June so get that date in your diary! If you aren't a regular racer, you've got a few months to brush up on your skills for this special event, we want as many boats on the water as possible, if everyone could invite a friend that would be super. For the first year our regatta will be included in the fledgling FYCA Yacht regatta series which takes the results from the regattas all over the Forth into account awarding a grand prize. We hope this will attract some visiting yachts to come and sail.
To qualify for the FYCA series you need to compete in 3 regattas, so to help our boats qualify we are also going to run a regatta series in the club encompassing Aberdour and East Coast Sailing Week(end) as well as our own. These results won't count towards the overall club championship so don't worry if you can't make them, but we hope it will make travelling to these regattas fun with Fisherrow Boats turning up team handed to enjoy the crack. Cruisers are welcome to come along and enjoy the social aspects too.
We have a lot going on with members of the committee firing on all cylinders. The club has been spruced up and rearranged, thanks to all who have helped, things are looking great! The planning for our Jubilee year is in full swing. A commemorative book is being produced, we will have a 6 week exhibition on the history of the club in the Musselburgh museum, we hope to use all this to raise the profile of the club and get Musselburgh on the water. We'll have a birthday bash at some point, and we want you guys to get involved in the Jubilee. We're going to have two 60 NM cruises in the yachts, there will be a 60 NM bike ride, we are looking for 60 dinghy things to do (capsizes anyone?), we want you to send in your photos to the club facebook and if you have a good 60th idea, share it! Take a club burgee on a 60 mile hike, bag 60 munros? Ski 60 NM in a week? Send us your photos, ideally we'd like 60 photos by the end of the year!
We also want to introduce 60 new people to sailing during the course of the year with tasters and push the boat out initiatives.
We are getting some merchandise made, nice mugs, stickers for your dinghies, burgees, some t shirts. Remember we already have club clothing available here: On Line Shop.
We are making exciting steps with our training this year. We have decided to try and get the club certified as an official RYA training centre meaning we can test and award certificates. This will let us teach things like Powerboat Level 2 and Dinghy Levels 1 & 2 at the club and save our members a good deal of money. We hope to extend these offerings to include VHF courses, first aid courses and yacht theory courses once we have appropriately qualified instructors in place.
We are also going to be running a summer club on the 24th - 26th July aimed at members and family groups a chance to make a big leap forward in your sailing ability. More details from Max.
The feasibility study has concluded and the report makes many recommendations of improvements to be made. We hope to make positive steps forwards on the back of this report and I am in contact with the Council to try and keep up the momentum.
The accessible / loading pontoon concept which we presented to the council, to allow yacht owners to take those of limited mobility and ladder climbing experience sailing (like kids, old codgers and the less abled), was approved by the council leader and every other stakeholder group in the harbour so we have high hopes of that being installed as a priority.
All these developments are covered in the committee meeting minutes which are published in our members only section on the club website if you would like to keep an eye on what is happening. Please keep in contact with any issues, suggestions or offers of assistance, the committee's details are on the website.