Good Morning Nipper Families,
Hope everyone has had a fantastic start to the weekend and is settling back into the new school routine. I know personally with my second child starting pre-school it’s taken a bit of family adjustment!
I wanted to firstly apologise to the lack of communications through January, normally January is a relatively quiet month for me in work but by contrast this year has been hectic and very time consuming. I have finally found some time this morning to provide everyone with a brief update on the start of our year.
Rash Vest PaymentsJust a reminder if you haven’t paid for your rash vest or hats please do come forward with payment either with a transfer or via cash, for those waiting on the larger vest they are on order and I will notify you when they arrive!

Age Managers and Volunteers
With over 80 nippers now registered for this season and many more enquiries still coming through the door we unfortunately are still struggling for helpers and volunteers on the beach. I always set out at the start of this season ‘to just get by’ and generally we have done amazingly well but we must now start to put some structure in place in readiness for next year. As such, I am looking for Expressions of Interest for the following roles please:- Age Managers – this role entails being a leader of an age group of children, my aim is to have two parents in each age group or group of ages (depending on how many people we have). To be an age manager you will need a working with children check and there is a very short online course to take. - Water Safety – this role requires parents in the water keeping an eye on kids and making sure everyone is safe while undertaking activities in the water. On any given session we probably need up to 5-10 parents in this role. This role does require a bronze medallion and a working with children check.- Photographer – as you have probably seen I like to be active on social media and I think its the best platform for raising awareness of our program but even more important with sponsors coming on board to support our program!- BBQ – whilst Dave is doing an amazing job every week on the BBQ, Dave is also one of my most valuable age managers and water safety team members – basically I need him back on the beach! So I am looking for people to take on the BBQ role – we can do this on a rotational basis if we get enough people. 
If you are interested in any of these roles can you please reach out on email or phone or come see me on Sunday!

New Equipment and Fundraising
In exciting news over the last two weeks I have been busily negotiating orders for new equipment and I am pleased to advise we have now secured orders for over $30k of new equipment for the nippers. This includes a generous donation from the board manufacturer of over $5k worth of discounts and equipment on our order. This will see 12 new Fibreglass Nipper boards, 11 Foam Nipper Boards and 2 new Race Mals arrive in winter ready for next year. We have also acquired 30 new body boards which arrived this week.
This is a great start and is credit to the hard work that has been put into  securing new sponsors and fundraising by all! We do however need this to continue so once again if you are interested in helping out in the fundraising department please reach out. I have a lot of initiatives on the go and offloading some of these would be amazing :-).

Memberships and Next Season
As I mentioned above we now have over 82 fully registered nippers and around 5-10 children 4 and under to participate casually. This is an amazing result but we are still growing. Only this week I have had enquiries from three Canberra families to join ready for next season. Demand is strong and this is looking great for next season. 
Planning has already commenced for next year but critical to the success will be parent involvement, I cannot encourage you enough to put up your hand to help out. Next year will hopefully see us return to competition and for this to be successful it will be all hands on deck! Please, please do reach out if you can help with any of the above which will assist with us going from strength to strength!

Tomorrow
Tomorrow is actually looking like our first warm sunday :-) – i may have actually jinxed it now but it would be great to see all of our nippers back on the beach and out in force! We will hopefully also have the new body boards to play with so it’s shaping up to be a very exciting day :-)

Looking forward to seeing everyone on the beach 10am Malua Bay!!!

Rhys Davies

Nipper and Junior Activities Coordinator

Batemans Bay SLSC

Bbslsc.nippers@gmail.com

0410204667

Interested in Donating? Check out our donations page here:

Project page URL (includes “story”): https://asf.org.au/projects/batemans-bay-surf-lifesaving-club/

Donation page URL (direct to online donation form): https://asf.org.au/donate/batemans-bay-nipper-fundraiser/

Play for Purpose Campaign: https://playforpurpose.com.au/batemans-bay-slsc