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!

Spring 2000 Telltale Archive

Full Spring 2000 Archived Issue

Commodore’s Report By John Pyles

Hello all!


I hope everyone had a good winter. Spring is now close at hand and that means it’s time to start sailing again! I’ve been having a lot of fun serving as your Commodore thus far and look forward to having a great spring quarter.


Our club is doing well. The majority of our boats are in working order and all the fleets are active and sailing. A lot of people have been working hard in the club to keep things going. Special thanks to those people who have put in the time to keep up the club: my other officers, fleet captains, committee chairs, instructors and those of you who came to work parties. It is your dedication that keeps this club strong.


But, of course we can always make things better. This spring will be an important time for the club as we prepare for two years of disruptions during summer and fall quarters. As many of you know the Seahawks will be moving into Husky Stadium for a two year stay in August. This means that almost all weekends in late summer and fall will be occupied by footballs games. Of course this will have a significant effect on our weekend classes and membership. This challenge is a great opportunity for us to improve our club and make it more fun for both you the current members and our new members.


I’d like to accomplish two things this spring: bring in 150 new members, and increase the activity of the club to make things more fun for current members. These are reachable goals. As I said before we have 40 good boats, a beautiful lake, a strong base of active members and a lot of potential. To make things happen we simply need the help of you, the members.


We already have a lot of things going on this spring including Snooze ‘n Cruise, the Annual Opening Day Party, specialty classes, a racing clinic and laser racing. I’d also like to try some new things like dingy day trips to Kirkland, afternoon mini-clinics and organized group open houses. The idea is to provide more opportunities for wyc members to sail with each other and have fun. The officers and program director are also working on ways to make the nuts and bolts of the club run more smoothly. The new wyc database will be up and running soon to simplify record keeping, and improvements will also be made to the sail locker.


As you can see there is a lot going on! If you would like to help with anything, have an idea you’d like to run with, or see a way in which the club could be improved please speak up! With the support and enthusiasm of members this spring should be a lot of fun and a lot of good sailing. What we need most right now is more instructors and help with publicity! New posters and flyers will be available next week in the office. Come by, grab some posters and help spread the word about the club!


Thanks again to all members who helped out last quarter! I look forward to seeing you all soon!