Duties.

Can you rationalize the number of people required to do duties to a minimum, for instance on a small lake with small fleets noe person could do the Race Officer and Flags Duty, especially if you could incorporate some automation.

In my club, there is a tendency to take on more and more events, but rely on the same pool of volunteers, I would advise against this or risk volunteer fatigue.  In fact I would advise tailoring the number of races to match the available number of volunteers.

Doing duties is an intrinsic part of the sport, you can usually do a duty that suits you, and can be a useful learning process.

Here in rural Oxfordshire, we addressed this by dividing up the duties. If you race, you do race duty or patrol boat, social/swimmers/others get the option of cooking lunch on a Sunday, or doing manual labour at work parties. Outcome? We get pretty much full race teams, superb Sunday lunches and loads of people happy to get wet and muddy on the winter work parties. Plus a few specialist roles. Give members the opportunity to do what they are happy with, and they will generally do it.

I'm happy to be OOD, I love the work parties (got a chainsaw!) and I have done galley in the past