As this annus horribilis comes to a close the news seems to be ever grimmer wherever one looks. Yes, the vaccine is the light at the end of the tunnel, but how far away is this light? I couldn’t help feeling that the presence of the Christmas star this year, visible for the first time in 800 years we are told, was an indication of renewed hope for the future – but for those of us in the western parishes, the cloud cover didn’t allow us a glimpse. Many thanks to P/C Ed Faries for taking and sharing such a lovely photograph.
One thing that this tough year has taught us is the importance of community; both the broader community and our own RHADC community. The Club means many different things to us and throughout this unprecedented year, the staff have done their best to ensure that it stays a safe and comfortable space for us, the membership. Your Club officers and the various committees too have been hard at work to make sure that every part of the Club is looked after: not just the fabric, but also the finances and in planning for our future.
We have been very fortunate that so many new members have elected to join our community and we welcome them into our midst. In the absence of social gatherings, we hope you have been enjoying “meeting” them through the New Members section of the newsletter. Just as Club memberships and demographics change over time, so we must change and adapt; we have to keep up with the times, renovate, find new ways of ensuring that the Club offers something to all our members: young and old, long-serving and new to our ranks.
The new committee working on the proposed bar renovation will meet (maybe virtually at first) either before the end of this week or early next to refine and develop the plans for the new downstairs bar. Whilst some members have expressed their views that a new bar is unnecessary, there is a great deal of support for this initiative from the broader membership and, in a cautious way, this project will gather pace in the first couple of months of 2021. We will not build what we cannot afford and it may be that the project will have to be phased over 2 budget cycles to be able to achieve the desired finished product. I have every confidence that the end result will be absolutely stunning and will perfectly position our Club for the decades to come.
As we end a year, where there have been times when it would have been much easier to just give up on trying to make things work, to figure out what the next set of restrictions might be and how we might manage around them, whilst still making the safety of our members and staff the first priority, it is important to look forward and to view the future with hope and confidence. In my first note to you all, I quoted HM Queen Elizabeth in her broadcast to the UK at the start of the pandemic; her Christmas message this year also bears repeating. Even though we still cannot gather with friends and family, she stressed that it was important to remember that we are not alone and that “even on the darkest nights there is hope in the new dawn”. That will resonate immediately to anyone who has ever raced offshore and I look forward to sharing our new dawn with you all.
Elspeth Weisberg
Commodore
December 31, 2020