Friday, 14th January 2022
With a great turnout, the Recreational Boating community caught up to celebrate the end of 2021 at the annual Christmas Party in December.
A fun night was had by all and at the end of a year where we were not able to have our normal presentations mid-year due to lockdown, we finally were able to award trophies and prizes for our past season.
The evening began with the joy of people catching up to celebrate Christmas and looking forward to the new year ahead. With a barbecue dinner and drinks, the festivities stepped up a gear and we launched into our presentations.
First up was the presentation of our new Recreational Boating badges, that are being awarded to our members who are regular attendees on Cruise in Companies. This new initiative was the brain child of club member Geoff Dumaresq. Club members who have completed two or more Cruise in Companies just need to nominate and they are presented with a club badge, with their name and that of their boat on it. This is ideal for club catch ups on cruises, as the name badges are a great indicator of who the club members are on the cruise. They also provide an easy way to associate a member with their boat, plus allows new members on a cruise to easily identify the ‘old’ hands. While we look forward to this initiative being used on our upcoming cruises, the recipients of the first set of badges were all very pleasantly surprised.
Other presentations included the Trophies for Navigation Rally SYC Cup and associated CUB Cup awarded to the Club with the best overall outcome (effectively the best team of boats from a club). With the multiple lockdowns over the past two years we finally were able to make a presentation in front of the full Recreational Boating community, with the SYC Cup to Christine Matheou-Fox (unable to attend) and Phil Strong for their win in the SYC Navigation Rally in 2020, and then David and Kate McCutcheon for their win in 2021. After now a number of years of SYC retaining the SYC Cup from an outright win perspective, it was great to finally have SYC take out the CUB Cup as best placed club in 2021. Club members Phil Strong and Kate McCutcheon were proud to accept the CUB Cup on behalf of the team of SYC boats that claimed the prize as best Club.
We then reached the main announcement for the evening, which was the Recreational Boating Person of the Year. It was a unanimous decision of the Rec Boating Committee to award the honour to Geoff Dumaresq. As mentioned earlier Geoff came up with the great idea of badge for regular attendees on Cruising events. Additionally he also kindly donated his time and energy to overseeing and co-ordinating the production of the badges, plus has volunteered to do this into the future. Geoff definitely has earned the honour and we congratulate him as the SYC Recreational Boating Club Member of the Year 2021.
Finally the festivities wound up, after the well received Christmas raffle prizes were award.
On behalf of the Recreational Boating Committee we trust all celebrated a wonderful Christmas and wish everyone a safe and hopefully less eventful 2022.
