They talk about stars being aligned but I think the clouds were definitely aligned to miss us on Saturday because we had glorious sunshine for our annual SMAC BBQ. From our vantage point on the BBQ deck (or over the toilets, depending on your point of view) we could see clouds dumping over Goodwood which must have diluted their champagne. However, our beers remained pure and helped wash down the enormous spread of food: procured by Steve, cooked up by Neville and finished off with an enormous pile of fresh scones with jam and cream made by Eleanor.

One of our traditions is to hot-smoke some fresh mackerel. Unfortunately despite lots of feathering from lots of boats we couldn’t produce any in time. Steve nipped off to the fish market so we wouldn’t go short. SMAC buying fish? That’s hard to take but looking at the bill, I’m now a lot less guilty about what I spend on my boat just to catch a few fish for the pot.

We missed our friend Bill but his protege Eleanor and Dan did him proud by extracting £763 from the assembled crowd in true Bill style. As usual we had a free raffle for members then an impressive table of prizes for the main event. Steve compered the comedy act of prize allocation where guests eventually mastered the rules and things went more smoothly. We are also very grateful to those absent members who bought raffle tickets remotely while sipping cocktails in their holiday resorts. It was a sheer coincidence that they won the smallest prizes, honest. At least Dave won’t be short of knives.

Thanks were expressed by all to Steve for doing a serious amount of running around and organising, Tim and Dan for running around shifting things, Eleanor and Dan again for the raffle, Eleanor again for the scones, the cook who just put stuff on the BBQ and everyone who joined on the day in either in person or remotely to make this yet another successful SMAC BBQ.

We are also very grateful to John Wearn for taking lots of photos of the event, a selection of which are in the gallery below.