Keeping people engaged during crisis

by Mads Ehrhardt
The Royal Danish Yacht Club, like many other nations and institutions, had to close down normal operations. Our club house is dark, our boats are lying still in the water, and our members cannot socialize, train, or race.

As we take the coronavirus situation very seriously, we also wanted to provide both activity as well as training for our members – and others. We welcome all.

We have been operating evening e-regattas during the entire winter on Tuesdays (where the normal on water regatta takes place during the season here in Denmark).

As we had several boats training in the winter, that are now prevented to take to the water, we wanted to do something else so we launched our Sunday regatta training – the Lockdown Series.

You won’t get cold or wet – and not that tired, however you will have a lot fun.

Last Sunday we had participants from UAE, Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Croatia, Switzerland, Australia, and Denmark.

Fierce, close racing and great excitement. Our racing is covered live from Esailing TV. All good regatta training for our members and everyone else.

Of course we have NOR/Sailing Instructions – and as we cannot use VHF, we use a Discord server to communicate with the sailors.

The Royal Danish YC has truly embraced e-sailing with a group of members called “the Pirates” donating 16 tablets in a flight case to the club to be used for e-sailing as well as other ways to engage our youth in our training and sailing education. We believe that if we have a challenge with keeping the youth as members, we need to “play on their turf”. So we did.

Now we have 30-40 participants in our Tuesday e-regatta, where we used to do it in our club house twice a month for the social aspect as well, and twice a month completely online, for now it’s all online for health reasons.

We then extended this to our Sunday winter training now that the boats are “grounded” – so to speak – and initiated the Lockdown series. Not possible to train on the water – then we do it on land and virtually.

Lockdown Series (in English): https://kdy.dk/aktivitet_detail.php4?uniq_id=2482&back=index.php
Discord server: https://discord.gg/5HTfy6h
Questions: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madsehrhardt/

Our e-race committee consist of three hard core sailors that enjoy the virtual competition. Lukas Mohr is ranked in the top 10 in the world for e-sailing, Philip Guhle is running our youth program and a pro-sailor with many championships, and then myself.

I felt that we needed some “positive” news in all of this “closed down” times, and see how we can find opportunities in this mess. Join us!