Winter 2001 Telltale Archive

Full Winter 2001 Archived Issue 

Commodore’s Report    John Pyles  Hello WYC! I hope everyone had a good fall quarter and got some sailing in. Despite the inconvenience of the Seahawks, the club had a good quarter as well. Our membership is good and we are doing well financially despite having few free weekends. Snooze 'n Crooze was great, (big thanks to Leslie and Debbie for that), and our new social committee threw a great Holiday Party (thanks to Megan, Susan and Andrea for that). We have continued to work on improving the nitty gritty aspects of the club such as the database and membership card system. Thanks to our computer guy Matt we have a new database, and thanks to Heather we now have lovely stickers for our cards instead of stamps. Our boats are looking good thanks to the hard work of our fleet captains and all of you that came to work parties. We have also added a few fun additions to our fleet such as the new Laser Pico and the International 14. All in all it was a great quarter. Hope everyone had fun, and thanks to everyone who helped out! Winter quarter is now almost upon us. Justin, our Vice-Commodore, is working hard on getting classes together. We are always in need of instructors, so if you are interested in teaching a class contact Justin. If you would like to take a class check out the WYC website. This quarter at Justin's lead we have decided to try and change WYC’s teaching philosophy somewhat. As most of you know one of our primary goals this last year has been increasing retention of new novice sailors in the club. We feel that a change in our teaching philosophy would help this goal. This quarter we will be working on getting at least one instructor for every four or five students, thus increasing the personal attention in classes. Class size might be reduced because of this, but the goal is to provide high quality instruction that really makes students comfortable novice sailors by the end of their class. The idea is that the more novice sailors know and the more comfortable they are, the more they will go sailing and the more likely they are to stay in the club and hopefully become more active. I'm confident that this will be a good thing for WYC given the skill of our instructors and the great job they are doing now with classes that are sometimes a little too full. In order to do this the club needs your help! If you have taught in the past or are interested in becoming an assistant instructor please contact Justin. There will be an instructors clinic on January 6th to give you an intro to the basics of teaching sailing, contact Justin about this as well. That's about all I have to say right now. If you have any other concerns, problems, etc. always feel free to email or chat with me. Have a great holidays and I hope to see you on the water next quarter!