The UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is expected to layout the timetable for the road out of lockdown later today, Sunday 10 May.
While we await the announcement, Rob Howlett of the RYA, has been talking to Howard Pridding of the RYA Legal & Government Affairs department, on just what the RYA has been doing to influence the government lockdown relaxation policy.
More interestingly, he also spoke to Queen Mary Sailing Club’s Tony Bishop, club secretary, and to club council member Paul Adams, on how they have handled the lockdown and their plans to get the club back sailing.
As Tony Bishop highlights, the priority for them is ‘getting members back in their boats and looking after the staff and the volunteers’, something all sailing clubs will be grappling with over the coming weeks.
All sailing and sailing club activity was abruptly halted by the tough government lockdown restrictions six weeks ago to combat the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19.
After six weeks of lockdown, with the death toll finally dropping here in the UK and Europe, the government is desperate to get the stalled economy reopened and some sort of normality back into our lives.
But, apart from a new slogan do not expect Boris’ announcement to reveal any Great Leap Forward, or even anything startlingly different than what we have seen from other European countries who have already taken this first tentative step.
Just where general sailing and any form of competitive sailing will feature in those plans, we shall possibly discover later this Sunday.
NOTE: The change of Coronavirus advice slogan from ‘stay at home’ to the less direct ‘stay alert’ (top image) has been rejected by the devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
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