Thank you to all who worked so hard on the Scholarship fundraiser
“Wine Knot!” What a great event, with bidding in person and online. The event has quickly become a major contributor to our Port Townsend Yacht Club Scholarship Fund for maritime education or the marine trades, helping local students complete their education or trade certificates. Thanks for all the wonderful donations and for the events and baskets bidders will soon enjoy.
Thanks to all who volunteer for the Watch duties. We have simplified those duties in the past year to make the job much easier. It’s a great way to give back to our organization with a minimum amount of effort.
We are also looking for an Event Co-Captain for the November Crab Feed. We have notebooks full of information on what has taken place in the past to help make the job easier.
I want to thank all the Cruise Captains for putting together some tremendous cruises for the upcoming boating season. We still need a couple of Cruise Captains for Opening Day and the Fourth of July Cruise to Stuart Island. We also need Co-Captains for both of those events and the South Sound and December Cruise to Bell Harbor. If you have not been a Co-Captain on a cruise before, it is helpful to start in this role, with the help of the Cruise Captains. Any one of us who has been a previous Co-Captain will help give you all the information needed.
Plans for Open Boat at Hadlock Marina will be announced soon. It will take place on Sunday April 28th, rather than Saturday, to avoid a conflict with the AAUW Home and Kitchen Tour, which several of our members are helping plan or are planning to attend.
- The Board is already planning the Past Commodores’ Dinner for Friday May 3rd, 2024, so the rest of the plans will be relatively simple.
- Duties for Saturday May 4th, 2024, Opening Day have been greatly simplified by opting not to do a boat parade, but instead go on a local cruise for a potluck and overnight stay, hopefully at a location where car travelers can join us. Several Board members have some great ideas of what the opening day “cruise” might look like and we are happy to share those ideas with you to get things started.
The Fourth of July cruise is a club favorite and perhaps the easiest cruise to plan, so please let me know if you are interested in volunteering. Having hosted this event last year, I can share some of the basic plans, and you can take it from there.
A final and BIG THANK YOU to everyone who makes our website and communications work so well, from the Baggywrinkle Newsletter to our web-based communications. These are critical parts to our organization. All the recent improvements have made cruise sign ups, record-keeping, and event notices so much easier, for the board and for event and cruise captains. If you need additional help with the website to make it work for you, just ask and we’ll get you the help you need. Training for the website features relevant to Cruise and Event Captains is scheduled for March 9th at 11:00 AM at the Clubhouse.
Don’t forget to submit a photo of your Favorite Destination for the Commodore’s Quiz. It’s a fun way of sharing your best boating tips on moorage or anchorage spots for spring and summer excursions.
See you at the next general meeting on March 12th, starting at 6:30 PM with our speaker Mike Novack of ultiMate Boat Care who will talk about underwater services and how those services affect vessel performance. Keep in mind, our meeting will take place at The Pavilion at Port Hudson, rather than at the Clubhouse, as we begin to try on new venues for size. We hope to land in the perfect spot, that suits our club members, without the challenges of maintaining and upgrading our current building, because, after all, it’s our love of boating that brought us together.
PS: Our new boat is on a large tanker, which we are tracking through AIS, and is now headed to the Panama Canal.
Commodore Eileen
There is nothing-absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
Kenneth Grahame