NAMBA October 2020 Web.pub

PROPWASH 4 October 2020 2020 NAMBA Nationals By Mark Grim NAMBA District 5 Director It is very unfortunate and with a heavy heart, that the 2020 NAMBA Nationals had to be cancelled. As a Co-Contest Director, a member of the Huntsville Model Boat Association, and the District 5 Director, it was an extremely hard decision. This was due to the restraints we had received from the City of Huntsville, and the Parks Department concerns for all of the model boaters that had entered the NAMBA Nationals. We felt it necessary to cancel the Nationals event. HMBA and myself were looking forward to meeting new people and seeing old friends that we have not seen in along time. I want to give a big THANK YOU! to everyone who helped with all of the preparations in the past year. Your hard work and dedication has been greatly appreciated. I also want to thank all of the Class Sponsors, the Venders that donated Raffle Prizes, Advertisers and everyone who had entered and had planned on entering the 2020 NAMBA Nationals. We can only hope that next year the world will be a better place and get back to some normalcy so we can all go back to enjoying model boat racing as we have known it for years. I am looking forward to hosting a couple of NAMBA District 5 races next year hear in Huntsville. I hope to see you here and under safer circumstances. Spring Proposals Results You may recall in April/May of this year the NAMBA membership voted on three proposals. One was for the clarification of official NAMBA courses and milling patterns. The second was to make Gas Outboard Tunnel an official NAMBA class. And the third was the handling of heats when the number of boats per heat became too few. The number of NAMBA members who were eligible to vote at the time (current 2020 members) was 1325. 329 members participated in the voting process of which some did not vote on all of the rule proposals. All three proposals passed with the following results. District voting participation is not posted, however it is available to the District Directors if they so desire. Proposal #1: Yes/264 No/65 Total votes: 329 / 24.8% Proposal #2: Yes/254 No/57 Total votes: 301 / 22.7% Proposal #3: Yes/268 No/60 Total votes: 328 / 24.8% News From District 7 By David Wale NAMBA District 7 Director 2020 has been a very strange year for all of us. Even more so taking the office of District Director, which was held by Jerry Wright for many years. I soon realized that I had some big shoes to fill. He did a fantastic job and I appreciate all of the hard work that he put in over the past years and it’s just one more reason that explains why he is a NAMBA Hall of Fame member. I still don’t know how he talked me into doing this job. The first time I called Jerry in 2020, I was greeted with the words “ have you had enough yet”, and that just set the tone for the rest of the year. Thanks Jerry! One of the first items on my to do list was to update our web site and social media page trying to get as much exposure as possible for our hobby in our own little world. I enlisted the expertise of Rod DeArmond to revamp the district web site. And after some long hard hours, not that the site was bad, but it was in need of a makeover. Now it’s up and running. We still have some glitches to work out and it will be an on going work in progress. We have also implemented a few other things. One of them being the District 7 Hall of Fame, which was spearheaded by John Borden for the 2018 Lone Star NAMBA Nationals which will soon be on our web site. Our district race season started off in early March with the Alamo Model Boaters putting on a race in San Antonio. We had a great time with lots of good racing and friendship that set a great tone to extend throughout the year. Then Covid-19 happened. We were canceling or rearranging race after race, but we knew we had to work together to address the challenges our hobby faced under COVID-19. We experienced declaration of a national emergency, state disaster declarations, shelter in place orders, school closures, social distancing requirements and mandatory business closures. My hope was to keep promoting the sport and continue taking our passion for this hobby going in the right direction. We ended up having to cancel the next four races of our race season.