New Year, New Officers

Headed by Commodore Jasmine Lee-Barber, our new officers are ready to incite change and boost student involvement.

BY ERIN JOHNSON

Annually, during the beginning of fall quarter, the Washington Yacht Club holds elections for the three student-held officer positions within the club: Commodore, Vice Commodore, and Rear Commodore. 

These positions have very distinct responsibilities. The club is lead by the Commodore who is the official representative of the club, and calls and conducts all meetings. Underneath the Commodore, the Vice Commodore organizes the lesson program within the club, and the Rear Commodore is the Club’s liaison and contact point with the Washington Racing Team. 

The results of the 2009 elections bring together officers Jasmine Lee-Barber, Mario Jaspers, and Krysta Bouchard.  These three dedicated WYC sailors each bring exciting ideas about the club and a strong commitment to their new positions. 

Commodore Jasmine Lee- Barber, a biology major and comparative religion minor, grew up sailing and has been very active in the club during her four years as a member. Serving as Rear Commodore last year, Jasmine recognizes the pressing need for creating a fun and accessible environment for students.  “We’re trying to foster a love of sailing.” Jasmine states. “It’s all about making the yacht club more approachable.”

Mario Jaspers, now Vice Commodore, began sailing four years ago when he joined the yacht club. Since then he has become a ratings examiner, laser fleet captain, and a lesson instructor. As Vice Commodore, Mario’s goals are to streamline the lesson sign-up process and create a greater sense of community through lessons. 

As Rear Commodore, Krysta Bouchard has one thing in mind: Racing. Krysta is heading up a Sunday afternoon racing program within the club that targets students who have taken lessons before and are looking for the next step in their sail training. “I want to get… an informal program going for racing,” Krysta says. “I feel like you learn a lot better when you race; you have to learn when it’s fast and you’re on your feet.” Also, as a former member of the Washington Sailing Team, Krysta can use this connection to encourage communication between the two student organizations. 

All three new officers share a love of sailing and of meeting new people within the club. It is this love that fuels their dedication to the WYC and their position responsibilities. Mario says simply, “I think there’s a lot of excitement in the club right by lots of members, and it’s our responsibility to nourish it, and that’s one of our main goals.” They plan to do this by keeping students more active within the club through lessons, racing, and by creating more club events.

This year promises to be one filled with new action and innovation. We have much to look forward to under this passionate trio of student leaders.

Summer 2004 Telltale Archive

Full Summer 2004 Archived Issue

Commodore’s Report    Abigail Plawman

Hi everyone!

I hope this summer will see everyone getting some sun and fresh air out on the water. We have had an amazing year so far, with plenty to keep everyone busy. In March, the club purchased six new Hobie Bravos and the Vice Commodore Kyle Fitzpatrick has been doing a fantastic job working them into an already busy lesson schedule. Matt and Heather Squires redesigned the website (from as far away as Costa Rica). In April, the Snooze ‘n' Cruise Committee put on another fabulous trip to Blake Island, complete with cake, ice cream, and piñatas for my birthday! (Thanks guys!) We had a great Opening Day party in May, thanks to Cath Dahle. Informal racing has really taken off this spring, thanks to the race team, who kicked it off by acting as race committee and helping those new to racing understand how it all works. We even had a weather lecture in June from Walter Kelley, AMS Meteorologist for Channel 13 – sailors can always stand to know more about the weather! Many great things were accomplished this past year. Thank you to all the members whose hard work made them possible.

In the past few months, Mike Evans has built a new rudder-rack for the sail locker as well as designed new laser mast racks for the docks – thanks for your hard work! We had a spontaneous committee form to work on how to retain new members, which provided numerous great suggestions for the club! We accepted several new-to-us boats, including a Hobie 16, Hobie 18, and a Laser. We continue to look for new boats, so if anyone knows of other potential donations, please let me know!

The hard work everyone has put into the club this year is much appreciated. Currently, the club is looking to fill vacant positions and get all of our fleets in shape for the summer. If you have time, energy, or ideas that you want to share with the club, we would love to hear from you!

See you on the water!

Abigail Plawman

Summer 2003 Telltale Archive

Full Summer 2003 Archived Issue

Commodore’s Report    Claudette Meyer

Hello Sailors! I hope everyone is enjoying the last remaining days of summer. The past couple of quarters for the club have been good. Several new Lasers and a Hobie 16 were added to our fleet; the majority by donation. Our fleet captains are doing an excellent job working to maintain our boats. Special thanks to Abi Plawman for her tireless efforts in maintaining the sails. George Richardson, Christian Rusby and Matt MacAdam completed the remodel of the keelboat locker, while Ross Fleming spent days setting up the computer in the locker. Cath Dahle provided us with a terrific Opening Day party.

Both spring and summer Snooze N Cruises produced great turnout. Classes have received good attendance and have been running smoothly under the direction of Interim Vice Commodore Kyle Fitzpatrick. The club hired Marie Sandona as the new Program Director so that Kate Bogh, our veteran PD of two years could graduate. Marie has been doing a great job in tackling the club's administrative tasks. I trust everyone had a great time these past quarters and I look forward to continuing our current trend.

Lately, I have been working to recruit new fleet captains and fill other vacant positions. Please see the club webpage for current vacancies. Thank you to all those who have volunteered time, energy and ideas; your help is very much appreciated. I have also been working with the Vice Commodore in an effort to standardize the material presented in lessons. This year's Instructor's Clinic will take place in the near future. The club is continuing to look for new boats. Thank you to all those who have been keeping their eyes open for potential new-to-us boats. And I have been working to provide members with more opportunities to practice in higher winds and to advance their ratings.

Sadly, summer quarter will be my last quarter as Commodore. I have enjoyed serving the club these past two years and hope to continue in the future. Thank you for another great year at Washington Yacht Club!

Claudette Meyer

Spring 2001 Telltale Archive

Full Spring 2001 Archived Issue 

Commodore’s Report    John Pyles  Hello WYC! Well even though the weather seems to be about the same, spring is almost here. Despite the lack of wind and small classes, we had a good winter quarter. What we didn't have in numbers we made up in getting stuff done. We had a number of successful work parties and got a lot of boats fixed. In addition we've purchased a new computer for the club office to help out our great new Program Director Cathy, and the club database is up, running and almost complete! Thanks to Matt for all his hard work on this! We've had lot of club business things going on such as by-laws revision, work on a new budget, and revision of the day-sailor handbook. We also hope to have the UW Racing Team joining us back at the WAC soon. They are in the process of raising money to purchase more FJs and will then be moving their practices back to the WAC. We look forward to having them around more and a more integral part of WYC. Also thanks to the social committee for arranging the movie nights and pool sharks to keep give us something to do while there's no wind. Going into spring quarter we are lucky to fill many of our vacant positions with new, enthusiastic people. We have a new purser, quartermaster, publicity chair, computer consultant, assistant keelboat fleet captain and double-handed fleet captain. Spring quarter will again be a big push for new members and getting old members who haven't been around for a while active in the club again. We will have the usual array of different sorts of lessons including a weekly intermediate class. There will also be regattas, social events, some special lectures, the annual Opening Day festivities, Snooze 'n Cruise, and more. This spring in classes we are concentrating more on quality than quantity, with a better students to instructor ratio. The goal is to work on member retention and getting new members, especially students, active in the club for the long term. A mentoring program is also starting up to help with this, contact Adam if you're interested in that. As always, if you have any ideas or suggestions come to a meeting or contact me. A final thank you to Heather for her great work on the last few Telltales. Heather took over the reigns a while back and successfully moved the Telltale onto the web. Also thanks for your burgee and reciprocal work. Matt and Heather are heading off to the East coast to a big boat that's going to go places where the water is swimming temperature, I know I'm jealous. Good luck you guys! We'll miss you! To everyone else: go sailing, come to the parties! See you on the water...

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!

Fall 2000 Telltale Archive

Full Fall 2000 Archived Issue   

Commodore’s Report By John Pyles     
Hello WYC! Well, a great summer has passed and now we begin the fall and the REAL wind. Thanks to all those who helped out fixing boats, teaching classes and organizing activities. Welcome to all new members from summer and autumn quarter! As many of you might have noticed the Seahawks have moved into Husky Stadium. Despite the disruption I hope we will have a great autumn quarter and work around the inconvenience.
    In the past few quarters we have made progress in making lesson signups easier through the web and increasing our membership. I hope that we can continue this trend and start looking to other ways we can improve the club. I think topping the list would be member retention. There are some new faces around the club who have been helping out a lot, most notably some new fleet captains, assistant fleet captains and assistant instructors that have been doing a great job. But, we still lose the majority of our new novice members after a quarter. To avoid burnout, which I think is one of the club's worst enemies, we need to try and continue to get novice sailors and new members more active in the club. I and others have made a number of suggestions of how to do this. Probably the best way is activities for newer members such as laser racing and daysails that get them more involved in the club. I again really, really encourage anyone with an idea for an activity to step forward and run with it. There's a lot of fun stuff we could do to help get new members involved and make them feel welcome. And, new members, let those of us who have been around a while know what we can do to make the
club more fun.
    There are a lot of other things going on, come to the general meetings to find out what's up. Other than that, take a class, go sailing, take a new member sailing, have fun!

Summer 2000 Telltale Archive

Full Summer 2000 Archived Issue

Commodore’s Report By John Pyles

Hello WYC! We've had a great spring quarter! We set a goal of 150 new novice sailors and we passed it! Great job to Justin Fallstrom our Vice-Commodore and everyone else who helped. WYC had almost 400 members last quarter. Hopefully we can keep it up and continue to grow.

Other news and thank yous: Big thanks to Leslie Carver and Eva Wong for putting on Spring Snooze 'n Cruise. There was good weather, a lot of boats, good food and I think everyone had a great time. Thank you to all instructors and assistant instructors. Without you we could not have had such a successful quarter. I encourage you to teach again. We need instructors! The only thing that held us back from more classes last quarter was a lack of instructors, there was demand. Contact Justin if you'd like to teach. Also, thanks to everyone who fixed boats. Our fleet is looking quite good right now and almost all boats are sailable. There are still a few lasers
with holes in them, so please come down and help out at the workparties on Thursdays.

There will be quite a bit of activity this summer in WYC so renew your membership! There are several classes including a number of specialty classes such as 505, daysailor, catamaran and high performance dinghy. If you're ready to
advance your sailing to the next level, sign up. On that note: lesson
sign-ups are now ONLINE! Huge thanks to our webmaster Matt Squires for doing this project. Life will now be much simpler and convenient for all of us.

Also this summer, I would like to do a complete revision of all of our club publications. This includes the day-sailing guide, keelboat guide, tests, forms, etc. If you would like to help out on this huge project please contact me. More information will be posted on the web and to WYC as we progress.

That's about it for now. Sign up for a lesson, go sailing, have fun!