Morning folks, it’s been a while since we’ve had much to tell you and it looks like the last thing we wrote about was the cancellation of the DF65 Nationals back in May. It’s now August and after a lot of chat between the DF Racing UK committee we have decided to cancel the rest of the 2020 TT season.

Whilst the situation has improved since we last posted there is still an awful lot of uncertainty about what the next few months hold in terms of the pandemic and how it evolves. For us to hold the remaining events puts a certain amount of pressure upon skippers to attend and perhaps puts people outside their comfort zones and, to be frank, that’s not what we’re about.

So the remaining two events in September and October at Fleetwood and Birkenhead have been cancelled so that’s the DF95 Nationals and the final TT event. A great shame, however there is some good news. Derek up at Fleetwood is determined to hold an event for DF95’s this year. With that in mind we have “Not the 95 Nationals” scheduled to take place on the same weekend of the 25th – 27th September. Obviously there is a possibility that the event may not go ahead but there is an good amount of confidence that we’ll get to the start line again this season with the DF95!

Please find the NoR by clicking here, filling in the form and submitting it. It’s really easy to do I promise…..

95’s @ Fleetwood 2019 – Photo – Sue Brown

So, we need to start looking towards 2021 and how that will work and after some discussion we have decided to try, where possible, to re run the 2020 calendar as it was. Obviously there will be one or two changes to make it work for the clubs but we are hopeful that we will not see another year as terrible as this again and we can go boating!

As well as the above there is now a good amount of socially distanced sailing going on at clubs all over the country.  Clubs are dealing with the reality of getting back to sailing on an individual basis and are following both local, National and MYA guidance as appropriate to their location.

Registrations have been strong throughout the last few months too, there has been a surge of dinghy clubs and yacht clubs around the UK taking up one or other of the DF Racing classes which is an encouraging direction not only for the DF Racing UK Class Association but also for Radio Sailing as a sport. Wayne will be along with a newsletter on the subject soon.