Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to be able to celebrate the Opening Cruise of the Royal Cape Yacht Club and to welcome the start of the sailing season once again. From a personal perspective, the sailing season is also the season of warm weather, long days and the sight of all the sails in the bay on Wednesday evenings and over weekends - my favourite time of the year and my favourite view.

The City of Cape Town has enjoyed a long and successful relationship with the Royal Cape Yacht Club and today is an appropriate occasion to reconfirm how much we value that relationship and how much we look forward to another season of successful collaboration.

Our work finds common ground on many fronts and through our partnership on several projects, the Royal Cape Yacht Club has made a significant contribution towards 2 of our important objectives - establishing Cape Town as a City of great events and employing sport as a development tool.

Part of the City's economic development strategy is to attract a calendar full of major events which we know brings event tourists, bolsters our seasonal and off-season tourism and provides opportunities for the supporting services businesses to grow and in turn offer employment. The Royal Cape Yacht Club, and the sport of sailing, has made an important contribution to the delivery of this objective. The most recent example being the re-introduction of the iconic Cape-to-Rio Yacht Race; which was spearheaded by John Martin and this club; and which the City is proud to be associated with. Importantly, the Cape-to-Rio also provided the City with the added opportunity to conclude a partnership with the City of Rio - the accord between the two cities was largely fostered by this club's leadership and the sailing event - and provides important collaboration and knowledge sharing around events, tourism and social and economic development. The agreement was signed in Rio, by former Mayor Dan Plato, when he travelled to Rio for the race finish.

The Cape-to-Rio also offered us a very unique opportunity to work on our other objective - using sport as a development tool - and many of you will know that the City was able to contribute towards the inclusion of two development teams in the race line-up - one of the teams sailed on a boat named "City of Cape Town" - which I believe was the winning team on handicap. The whole city followed these two teams as they raced across the Atlantic egging them on as the race under-dogs. The two teams did us proud - as I indicated the one team won the race on handicap and the other team completed the race under after some trying issues - including the failure of their water supply. Of course we also know of the dramatic and very worrying events of the same team's return journey, when we lost contact with the team and had an all ships alert was put out. The team was eventually found and rescued and we welcomed them ashore at the Simons Town Naval Base in good health and spirits thanks to the leadership of Kader Williams and their excellent seamanship.

The important element of this story, is that through the relationship between the City and the RCYC we were able to give significant meaning to the sailing development programmes we support but offering yachties, who would not easily have the opportunity or resources to participate in a major event like the Cape-to-Rio the chance to take part in a world class event.

The City of Cape Town is blessed with a magnificent coast line and a beautiful bay and over the coming five year term of this administration we will seek to build on our relationship with the RCYC which gives some life to these wonderful natural gifts and in doing so we will together contribute to developing our tourism industry, our services economy, the incredibly valuable image of this great city, and importantly, through our development programmes, will give hope to those who have been marginalised socially and economically by our apartheid history.

We wish the club a successful sailing season and we look forward to our continued collaboration.