To Manolis Barbopoulas – President of the Hania Sailing Club 

and Anastasios Nikolau – Chairman of the Greek NJCA

From Stuart Jardine – IJCA ITC Representative, the Chief Measurer and UKJCA Secretary.

Dear Manolis and Tasos,

I would be most grateful if you could please pass this letter on to all your Sponsors, Sailing Officials, Voluntary helpers and also the Greek sailors, particularly those who attended the fantastic European Championships in Souda Bay.

Yes, the weather was unfortunate but this was not within your powers to put right, you can be heartened to know that we have had less fortunate earlier European Championships with either too light or too strong winds and less races sailed to complete the event.

The organisation and the effort that you and your teams put in over the past two years to ensure the huge success of this Championships was nothing but miraculous and included persuading 15 Greek Teams to come to the event. It was to me so very, very pleasing to see the huge improvement of every Greek boat since our training last year. For me “The Icing on the Cake” was the Hellenic Police with Alexandros Tagaropoulos winning the Championship, you should all be very proud of their great achievement.

As the IJCA Technical Representative your efforts to ensure that at least 16 Greek J24’s now have full International Class Certificates is also an achievement in its own right and I hope that over the next years we will together be able to fully measure more Greek boats. The co-operation from your owners and the willingness to understand our Class Rules and Regulations has been outstanding and they all deserve a big thank you. The same obviously applies to all your volunteers for helping to achieve this, from those in the Office to those assisting Gabor and I measuring and weighing a big thank you.

Your Caterers produced the best food that I have experienced in my 25 years in the J24 Class at either World or European Championships, truly great and much appreciated by us all.

The final Prize Giving and Dinner for all the competitors was fabulous and I can say the best end of regatta event that I and many others have ever had the privilege of attending.  Ensuring that every boat was presented a memorial scroll was a great idea and personally Mary Ann and I were so pleased with your choice for the “Old Boat” trophy, thoroughly deserved and a complete surprise for the crew.

Then can you please pass on to your Naval Academy all my crews thanks for so kindly letting my International Team (British, Swedish & Danish) use one of their boats, I hope that they are able now to use it for competitive racing and training. I think like a Phoenix it has risen from the dead including an International Certificate. There are still important fittings missing so it will be necessary to find some maintenance funds, I can advise the items necessary to ensure it is truly ready for sailing.

Finally, to you and everyone involved from volunteers to sponsors a big thank you from the International Class, we all know how hard it is to organise and run a major championships, your efforts have been outstanding.

Yours very sincerely,

Stuart