2022 Noel Croucher Award

On behalf of the Club, the Commodore congratulated the recipients of the Noel Croucher Award in 2022, Mr Robert Berkley who had been nominated to receive the award for Sailing and Ms Bonita Leung who had been nominated for Rowing, both of whom had made truly exceptional contributions to the Club in their respective sports over many years.

Mr Berkely had singlehandedly run the HKPN handicapping system for the HKSF for the past 13 years. The HKPN system brought a huge number of boats and sailors into yacht racing and his hard work on this has made HKPN much more relevant than it was a decade ago. His work touched sailors across Hong Kong, from all of the clubs.

For the Club, Mr Berkley had taken over the reins of the ATI rating system which was formerly run by Mr Jamie McWilliam. Mr Berkley was also one of the co-founders of the Hong Kong Shorthanded Sailing Association, who organised a number of events during the lockdown period when fully crewed sailing was a challenge and the clubs were not allowed to be involved. Shorthanded sailing is very popular worldwide – this group will continue to organise shorthanded events or form a division in existing big boat events.

Mr Berkley was an active member of the Big Boat fleet, racing with his boats “Sex Drive” and then “Calamansi”. He now had a larger cruising boat that he often raced double-handed. He was a member of the Big Boat Committee and the Offshore Racing Committee. As an experienced offshore sailor, he also acted as a scrutineer for offshore races.

The Commodore invited Mr Robert Berkley to receive the Noel Croucher Award for his outstanding contribution to sailing.

Ms Bonita Leung had brought huge attention to expanding accessibility and inclusivity for rowing and paddling in the recent years. She set up, managed and ran a pilot 7- week dragon boat training program for cognitively impaired individuals to expand comfort level with water sports during Covid in the summer of 2021. The program was so successful that not only was it prominently covered by the local press, it was also picked up by the Financial Times and generated positive coverage for the Club and especially for the rowing and paddling section. Ms Leung then further expanded on the pilot program to organize an inclusive dragon boat race in June 2022 in the Wan Chai basin for local teams with cognitively impaired racers. Due to that program, the Australian Dragon Boat Federation has reached out and requested support and guidance on setting up inclusive dragon boat training programs and races; there had also been discussions with adaptive racing teams in the United States to exchange ideas on how to expand accessibility of dragon boat racing for all.

Ms Leung also assisted in promoting the Club’s image to the public as being a firm supporter of the inclusiveness of water sports and that barriers to even paddling could be overcome. During Covid’s “5th wave”, she spearheaded club-wide ‘Move For Hong Kong’ fitness initiative to spur sports to compete against other sports to raise funds for Covid-related relief and to bring the Club’s sports together; as part of that initiative she assisted in setting up a crowd-sourced online fundraising platform for the Charity Foundation to modernize its ability to fundraise.

Ms Leung had been an active member of the Paddle Sports section for many years. She has been a member of the Rowing Committee since 2020, Paddle Sports SubCommittee from 2016-2018 and is recently the chairman of Dragon Boat SubCommittee. She has raced locally for the Club’s dragon boat and outrigger canoe teams and internationally for the Club’s dragon boat team. She was also an active contributor in race management and in the Club hosting dragon boat races to further develop the Club’s ability to work with the relevant national sports federation to attract overseas competitors to race in Hong Kong.

The Commodore invited Ms Bonita Leung to receive the Noel Croucher Award for her outstanding contribution to rowing and paddling