Firstly I want to apologise that we have not yet been able to get our swimmers back in the water, unfortunately this has been totally out of our control and as you know we have been working very closely with the Blue Pool to try and get us back as safely as possible.

I am pleased to finally be able to tell you some good news, and that is that we aim to restart some sessions very soon, unfortunately due to the Blue Pool operating at reduced opening hours, and us having to have time between sessions to allow for safe exit and cleaning, the Blue Pool are unable to offer us all of our previous sessions at this time.

The Blue Pool have also stated that we will not be able to start our Teach to Swim sessions at this time. We know this will be very frustrating for many of you but we would like to reassure you that we are actively working with the Blue Pool in the hope that we can work towards restarting these sessions as soon as possible.

In order for us to return to the pool we have to follow a number of rules that have been set by the Government, Swim England and the Blue Pool. One of these rules states that we can have a maximum of 32 swimmers in each session, four lanes of 8 swimmers. This means that at this time we will have to limit all swimmers to one session per week to allow as many members to swim as possible. We hope that as progress is made, with respect to the pandemic, we will be offered more pool time and be able to extend/provide more sessions.

At this point in time we are working with the poolside team to see if we could run all three of the sessions that have been offered to us. As you can imagine this is not an easy task as everyone’s home and work lives have changed a great deal due to the current situation. We will also need to split our swimmers and coaches into bubbles so that we limit contact between them - the safety and wellbeing of our swimmers and volunteers is the most important thing to us.

In order to aid our planning could we please ask that if you have not already completed our swimmer’s survey then you please do so by clicking this link Swimmers Survey.

For those that are able to restart sessions, over the next few days we will be sending out various documents that will need to be completed before you will be able to get back in the water so please look out for these and get them back to us as soon as you can. If you would prefer your swimmer not to return to sessions straight away, we fully respect that decision and there will be an opportunity for you to notify us of this when we send out the documents this week.

Thank you so much for your continued support and understanding whilst we find our way through these unprecedented times. We know swimmers and their families desperately want to get back to the pool. Please be assured the committee want to see you all back there too and are doing all they can to make this happen as quickly as possible.