Well what a summer!

We have had more courses and people on the water than ever before if we include the new genres of rowing and windsurfing, so well done everybody, especially our almost-full-time senior instructor Chris Whatley and his great band of instructors.  We have had 5 cadet and 2 adult sailing courses, 3 windsurfing courses, 2 powerboat courses

and 4 Atlantic rowers are currently training at the club in our skulls under the excellent supervision and instruction of Natasha (Tash) Howard, a rowing instructor and former Olympic rower.  We are also delighted to welcome Archie, Rachel and Aimee to our corps of instructors, well done on completing the course and receiving the qualification.  We have also enjoyed an amended Midsummer in the Minch trip to Rona and Gairloch, although in the event few boats took part and even fewer of the members so there may have to be a rethink on this before next year.  As always your thoughts will be welcome to make this an event that appeals to more of our members.

And we still have a bit of the season left and have plans to fill it...

Sailing continues on Tues, Wed and Thurs evenings for Adults, Cadets recently qualified and improvers respectively, and we have introduced more sailing spaces on the bigger boats on Wednesdays to accommodate more cadets.  If there is any difficulty getting a place please let us know and we will make arrangements to ensure that you get out sometime, even if on occasions it has to be on a different night.  We also plan to run Saturday sailing (weather dependent) from October till the end of the year.  As the weather gets worse we need to be careful not to let the less experienced cadets get too cold, so this year we will allow all to sail in October, but less experienced (this year’s qualified cadets) will stop then.

Windsurfing will continue on Saturdays until the water gets too cold, so continue to watch the website and Facebook especially as the autumn progresses and the weather deteriorates.

Keelboats  We are keen to hold at least one other event this year, and plan a Round Raasay race on Saturday 25 September.  Offical entry forms will be available by 10th September.

End of season on Saturday 9 October we will take the masts down on the Quests and Bahia’s and follow that with a get-together in the boathouse.  We would like to invite all our brilliant helpers to join the trustees and instructors for a very special evening, when we might even get round to making a few awards!

Website The website continues to be developed and your experiences with it are important to us, so whether they be good or bad, if you have anything that you think might be of value to us in our endeavour to make it the best sailing website in Scotland, please let us know.  Elaine has kindly accepted the challenge of updating the content so observations on content would also be welcome. Thanks also to Murdo for his fabulous drone shots of the boats.

Finally many thanks to all those who have helped in so many ways to make the season so spectacularly successful.  Without you in shore support, on the safety boat, just fixing things or being in charge of a session this just would not have been possible.  Thank you all.