Feature | Volunteers – A Review of the Last Decade
Volunteers – A Review of the As this article is being written we are all eagerly looking forward to 22 April when we hope we will all be allowed to start to sail (and race) again, and the Sailing Office and the Club’s Race Officers are starting to plan the resources needed to run racing. In anticipation of a return to activity both as a sailor and a volunteer on a committee boat, I’ve done a bit of a ‘wander down memory lane’ to reflect on how the role of race management volunteers at the Club has evolved over the last decade or so. W O RD S: LU CY SU T RO, VI CE C O MM O D O RE | IM AGES: GU Y N O W EL L
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number of factors influenced the growth of the volunteer base: in 2010 the Club was awarded the bid for hosting the 2013 Flying Fifteen World Championships, in 2012 the Race Management SubCommittee was formed under the Sailing Committee and in the same year the Club arranged for Rob Lamb, an International Race Officer to come to Hong Kong to run a series of seminars training those members interested in learning how to become a Race Officer. The combination of these factors lit a spark of interest in many who wanted to have the
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| MAY 2022 AHOY!
opportunity to help the Club in the running of these events. I was one of those individuals. By the time the Fifteen Worlds took place in October 2013, the list of individuals who were involved as volunteers had grown from a handful of names to over 100 people – doing jobs both on the water (committee boats, mark laying boats, safety boats, jury boats) and onshore (measurement, registration, launch and retrieve). At that event it worked
