I’ve been doing the job of Site Secretary for a couple of years and am starting to get the hang of it now. All meets for 2010 have now been booked and confirmation letters are about to go out.

If you want to steward a meet you’d better be very quick indeed. The site list came out for its first viewing at Little Totham and many of the meets have been snapped up already. By the time you all read this with any luck they will all have been taken (but check the site list just to be sure).
There was a slight hiccup with the booking of the Little Totham meet in that we were told that the beer festival was on from the week before Fathers Day and finished on Fathers Day itself. Sadly the beer festival didn’t start until Sunday but then National Pub of the Year isn’t decided on a week long beer festival and everyone was more than happy with the selection of beers available.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, a couple of members said that wasn’t it a shame that we couldn’t stay until Monday. Well, the good news is that we can stay till Monday, or Tuesday or Wednesday but it has to be done “proper”. Every weekend meet that we hold is covered by our exemption certificate which allows us to camp for up to 5 days (5 x 24 hours) at a time.

If I know that a steward (or temporary steward) is able to open a meet on Thursday, or even Wednesday and maybe stay until Monday or Tuesday I’ll be only too pleased to contact the landowner again and see what they have to say. I have to inform the Club three months before the meet by updating the Out and About database and also let the Eastern Region handbook committee know by October. (If the meet is not in the Clubs database then it is not an official meet and hence not covered by any insurance etc... This affects stewards wanting to get to site a day early for a ‘working party’ as well!).

Sometimes it is not possible to extend a meet in this way (schools don’t like caravans in the playgrounds when the kids are there for some reason and we have to try and keep two clear days between our meets and other sections of the C&CC) but just imagine what the DA would be like with twenty 5 day meets on the year planner!

If you want to open a site early for us then please let me know as soon as possible so that I can update all the databases, lists, spreadsheets and little scraps of paper that I use to organise all the meets.

Lucy Walland