Dear Flying Dutchman Sailors,
I hope you all had a good start of 2024 and I wish you all a Happy Healthy and Beautiful New Year!
I wish for all of you that you have enough free time to spend on sailing and that it is not going to be too much of (20)24/7 to you!
It looks like an interesting sailing season for the Flying Dutchman with both a Worlds and a European Championship in one year!
So we will soon have the Worlds in St.Petersburg. Of course there is always a bit extra on organizing a Worlds overseas but it all looks very promising!
The problem with the container fares that we were so afraid of sort of disappeared and with our container support the transportation costs became quite reasonable. Again Frank Nooijen has done a great job in organizing the shipment of the containers and he really deserves a big compliment from all of us for putting so much time and effort on the job.
At this very moment it is not yet clear if we will have competitors from Oceania. I hope they can decide to come to St.Petersburg. It would be very good for the competition.
And at the end of the season we will have the Europeans in Cadiz Spain where a big fleet is expected and we will have a great welcome by the Spanish and the City of Cadiz! After the Championship the boats can stay in Cadiz for the winter as we will have the Worlds in Cadiz in spring of 2025. In between these two big events races are planned. So easy to join them as the boats are already at the spot. All together a very interesting format!
On the registration of the membership we will introduce a “digital” membership. As a transition we will have both the old-fashioned membership sticker as well as the digital for 2024. We want to do it this way in order to get experience with it and be able to remove problems that might come up easier.
I wish you all great sailing in 2024!
Regards
Peter van Koppen
President IFDCO
