Dear fellow Redwingers,

This year has been unusual to say the least! Your committee have been discussing our year at length and as you already know the 2020 Inlands have been cancelled due to the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic. Some of us are now fortunate enough to be able to sail recreationally but the shore arrangements are far from business as usual.

This week we looked closely at our main annual feature, the National Championship in the Isles of Scilly. It currently looks like the islands are set to be opening up next month for visitors, on a much reduced and cautious level. There is still no clear idea of when racing at a national level may be able to resume, when activities may happen in large enough groups, when we will be allowed to be close enough to crew a Redwing together or when we may be able to have the sort of social occasions that our fleet looks forward to at our gatherings.

It is with great sadness that your committee have decided to cancel the 2020 Nationals in light of the above and to postpone the 2020 IOS venue to 2021. We fully understand the enormity of this decision as it will be the first year since our records began in 1947 that a winner will not be declared!

This decision brings up a number of questions, we will do our best to pre-empt these here.

Nationals 2021 – Our National Championship in 2021 will be held at the Isles of Scilly on Saturday 21^st August to Friday 27^th August 2021. The Steamship Company have agreed to roll over the existing 2020 boat transport and passenger bookings to next year and honour the discounted offer. Clearly each individual accommodation provider will have their own policies but it is thought it is likely that we will be able to move bookings to the following year with limited difficulty.

AGM – Our AGM is usually held at the Nationals as our largest gathering. In the absence of this we plan to hold the AGM remotely as a video conference. The AGM will be held on the 18^th of August 2020 to start at 1900. More details will follow in the coming weeks.

Future events – Using the 2020 venue for the Nationals in 2021 does inevitably have a knock-on effect on our currently planned future venues. Your committee are currently in discussion with those venues with the aim of securing viable options that we can vote on as usual (but from a distance!) at this year’s AGM. We hope that they will be understanding of our need for flexibility caused by this unforeseen change of plans.

We hope that this finds you well and that you are able to use this time to complete all of those jobs your dearest wooden friend has been requesting before hopefully getting afloat this season.

Our Kindest regards,

Your NRDA committee.