ACF Sailing - Restart Update

31 Jul 2020 by Matt Grier

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Dear Sailors, Volunteers and Supporters,

On Wednesday, we were over the moon to hear some good news for sailors as the RYA announced the following update on their efforts to persuade the UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) to enable us to sail and race with less strict social distancing. Ian Walker (Director of Racing at the RYA) issued the following;

‘Please note that the RYA have now received approval from DCMS to ‘return to play’ for sailing boats with crews from mixed households. This does not mean clubs should automatically change their rules but it will give more freedom for those who choose to do so.

You can find the new guidance here – https://www.rya.org.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/clubs/RYA%20Sailing%20%26%20Racing%20in%20Mixed%20Households.pdf

(a hard copy of this link can be found attached to our ACF news article)

This enables crew members from mixed households to come within 1 metre of each other, subject to a range of mitigations. This means day boats can now be raced fully crewed if everyone on board is prepared to accept the level of risk resulting from their activity and choice of mitigations. Note the guidance on the definition of “close contact” and the implications for self-isolation in the event that one crew members tests positive for Coronavirus.

This will not be a full return to normal, but much closer with sailing clubs, race officer teams and our ACF team need to fully review this guidance to make sure we can keep everyone safe.

We would love to get back to full sailing as soon as possible but we do have a lot of people with underlying health conditions we need to protect. Thus with the aim to not jump the gun we are preparing to over August, run some test sailing sessions to make sure we comply with our host club (CCYC’c policies) and also are own cleaning process, along our normal values of equality and inclusion.

Our goal will be to be as back to normal as possible by the start of September, and be able to follow the guidance of the government and RYA clearly.

Trial sails – if you would like to be involved in some of our trial sails, which will involve, managing social distancing, sailing, testing our cleaning procedures and our future expectations on those with us (sailors and volunteers) we would love to hear from you.

Please email info@acfsailing.org if you would like to be involved. We will also send out a survey via our app/website to members next week to check for availability.

Also we have some very exciting information coming out over the next two weeks and we look to sharing the news.

Yours sincerely,

The ACF Sailing Team

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