Dear Members,
Becoming the Commodore of a yacht club is not something that happens overnight. There are years spent serving on committees, limitless evenings and weekends sitting through what seems to be endless meetings. It’s a long haul. Then, suddenly after an AGM, it does happen overnight.
To be honest, I hadn’t given much thought to what it might feel like, to be suddenly your Commodore. It was just something that was inching its way towards me. Like old age.
This year, in particular, events have been somehow out of focus. The shock of the sad finale to Willie’s tenure, with Paula’s untimely death which rocked us all off our foundations. Then March, with a series of socially distant meetings and the postponement of the Commodore’s Ball and the AGM. Was any of this really happening?
At my interview with the Nominations Committee team I brought up the fact that as an International Judge I would have to spend a fair amount of time off island each year officiating at various events. Since we live in the northern hemisphere, it was excused on the basis that most of the events I would be going to would be during the summer, when RHADC would be unlikely to be hosting international events, so I would be excused if I wasn’t on the terrace every Friday night trying to emulate Willie in chatting to every table (did he ever eat? Or did poor Paula eat alone most of the time?). So far this year, of the 7 international sailing events that were in my calendar, 6 have been cancelled and I am expecting the 7th to be cancelled pretty soon. Maybe this is going to be a year with no sailing events? How can that be?
Is it my bad luck to be taking over as Commodore in the year that there is going to be no sailing at RHADC? We don’t know. Maybe. I would be dishonest if I did not say there I am rather anxious about the effect of this on our Club and its future.
All we do know is that the road ahead is uncharted and it isn’t going to be easy. Now, more than ever, we need the support of our members. I do not want to be the Commodore, upon whose watch the club failed – but it is not going to be a serenaded moonlight path that we are going to dance down. It’s a rocky passage with no channel markers.
We are not going to run aground.
One of my best memories of RHADC during 2019 was when we hosted the Optimist Nationals. We had dodgy weather, but everyone made the best of it. Our staff never knew how many people they were going to have to cater for at a given mealtime, but they coped so, so well. I can picture now the terrace with 120 kids and their coaches ready for the morning briefing before launching. Will we ever have 120 people on our terrace again? It’s hard to imagine now. We may not be able to go back to life as it was before the Covid-19 pandemic but we will do our best to ensure that RHADC once again becomes the place where our members want to come and just ‘be there’.
Elspeth Weisberg, Commodore