GMM 8/24 Minutes

GMM Minutes: 8/25/24

Type of Meeting: Nonvoting 

1. Welcome: Nicho, Commodore

2. Reports from Officers

1.  Vice Commodore (Open Houses): Isha Mishra & Dennis Tai

   • In total this season, we have given 1,185 people rides on keelboats and dinghies at Open House.
   • Big thank you to volunteers, and a shout out to our Banquet Chair, Dawson.
   • The 8/25 open house, we had 301 rides. This included two big groups - one from Young Eagles in San Jose and another group of Au Pairs.
   • We have 2 more open houses this season in September and October.
   • If anyone has any ideas to continue improving open house planning and execution, they can ping Dennis and Isha.
   • We are also looking for a new Saturday Coordinator Chair who can be the lead for ensuring there is always a coordinator at Saturday Lessons. Reach out to Birk or Isha if interested.

2. First Vice Commodore (Dinghies): James Clarkson, Memo Gunay

   • We have acquired 3 new to us boats in the last quarter. A donated JY15 and Laser and we purchased a weighted centerboard Venture.
   • We are now storing gennakers in mesh bags behind the laser area. The bags are color coded and labeled based on the boat. Please email us if you have any questions.
   • New tiller extensions – where do the current ones keep going?  Why are they breaking?
   • Finally, thanks to everyone who puts in the time and effort to maintain our fleet. Let us know if you need any support with a project to get a boat back to green!

3. Second Vice Commodore (Windsurfing): Adam Rinder

   • The second vice commodore congratulated the many windsurfers who had advanced in their ratings.
   • Lots of repairs to equipment are needed and underway!

4. Third Vice Commodore (Keelboats): Shreyas Chand

• Uncle Donald is back! Bottom job, rudder rebuild, rudder shaft reattach.
• J/80 is still unfortunately DNS. We were keeping it offline to prevent damage while insurance was being sorted out. Unfortunately still waiting on a full repair quote and payment, but working on getting good enough repairs done soon to bring it online.
• Dr. Who on deck for standing rigging replacement and bottom job.
• Merit batteries on deck for replacement.
• J dock update - making connections with all councilmembers, educating them on the issue, ultimately aiming to get support for the resolution from as many of them as we can. Reach out to Shreyas/Camille/Sara if you're in district 1 and 5 for the last few councilmembers to whom we want to reach out.  
  • Also, if you are a Berkeley resident, please put yourself on this sheet to help us get support from City Council

5. Rear Commodore (Teaching): 

   • Sailing: Marco Falcioni delivering for John Bongiovanni

     • I really wanted to be at this GMM to talk with you, because we’ve had a lot of exciting things happening in our sailing program, but COVID got in the way, fortunately not very strongly
     • As you know by now, I’m a numbers guy, and I usually run through the lesson and ratings numbers here. I will do that very briefly this time, because I want to highlight some really important changes in our sailing instruction program that have happened in the past few month.
     • The numbers show that we are teaching more dinghy students now than we did pre-COVID, especially during weekdays. And our keelboat program is  back in action. We are closing the season with a fantastic Fast Track program and Advanced Dinghy, which is extending into September.
     • I want to highlight four things.
       • Mike Jones came up with the idea of an overall Fast Track coordinator I think three years ago. And in contrast to the “you should do this great thing”, Mike said “I will do this great thing”. And he has,  and it has improved incredibly our Fast Track programs in a whole bunch of ways. This year, Mike overlapped with Lucian Beebe, who is taking the tiller from Mike for next year. Thanks so much to both of them.
       • We had an enormously successful Women’s Fast Track this year, and Mo Johnson will talk about that. I just want to say that in even the runup to this, we were seeing many more women instructors in our normal programs, so great success here.
       • Wednesday Night Keelboat is back. We are doing it regularly, thanks to a push from Saul and Liang organizing it. We’re getting back to where you just show up for Wednesday lessons, and skills levels are sorted out on the dock.
       •  I have been trying in different ways to help dinghy instructors become better, but nothing really took until Mo Johnson did the Teach Along to get women instructors confident and ready to teach at the Womens’ Fast Track. The idea was to focus on teaching a specific skill, with a chalk talk ahead of time, followed by actual teaching. Each boat had a Novice level student, a relatively new Junior instructor, and an experienced instructor. It worked out incredibly well, and Mo will lead institutionalizing this at the Club. We envision offering it on a regular basis, each time focusing on a different skill to teach.
     • As always, I will conclude by thanking all of the instructors who have kept our sailing program going at a very high level.

   • Windsurfing:  Randi Shapiro

• The instructional program has been active—big thanks to Steven L. who kept classes staffed when I was away with my family.
• We have run two certification courses, the WIPA Level II certification that was in progress during our last meeting, as well as a second WIPA Level I certification. These are certification courses for our instructors, which has been an area of focus for us the past three years.
• Since our last meeting, we’ve introduced windsurfing to 186 new Novices. We had fewer Novice students in July and August relative to our numbers last year. This year’s numbers for July and August are on par with our pre-pandemic instruction and slightly reduced from 2021 and 2022. The program has not significantly changed since last year and weather scores have been good this year, so my current speculation is that this reduction may be due to external factors like increased vacation travel or that manner of thing. 
• I have adjusted the frequency of our Novice I classes down due to this and have increased the Novice II and III classes as there was unmet demand earlier in the year. Overall class demand is lower, however, across the board.
• A slightly higher percentage of this year’s Novices have earned their Junior rating, with a total of 34 new Juniors plus 8 new J+ members since our last meeting. Congrats to new J+ members Brett P., Sean K., Alec V., Borbala S., Nelz C., Salem S., Milan W., Piter B., and Cassidy B.!
• We also have two new Senior members, Burhan and Ivan B.!
• Finally, continued thanks to John B. for his continued development—our volunteer instruction is now managed through the site, and we’re working on adding some automated features to help with student communication and class management, which will help obviate the busy work for my position and make  the student and instructor experience more consistent.

6. Port Captain: Birk Huber

   • The Fall Schedule is set. Please note that we are rapping down from the summer boost as the season ends. We will have lower coverage, please help the day leaders by checking out (& in) your gear and putting things away properly to avoid adding friction for the day leaders.
   • The tides look good for the rest of the year but as we get our water back we will start loosing daylight, carpe diem.
   • We are stepping rescue training for day leaders and can use experienced juniors willing to help them practice rescuing sailboats. If you are interested please contact David Elias (or the port captains who will forward you to him).
   • We have started on renewed powerboat training for people who are assisting day leaders or otherwise need it to support club activities. If you are interested in being an DL assistant please reach out to the port captains, if you are already please consider grabbing weekend midday shifts to give the DLs extra help.

7. Secretary: Sara Zimmerman

   • We are chugging away with our secretary duties
   • We have translated the CSC informational postcard into Spanish, so those are now available – we have 250 to use by the end of the session, so share them anywhere you think they’ll be useful.  Thanks to Luis for helping me with the translation.  If people are interested in seeing these in any other languages, let us know if you can help translate and we can work on that.

8. Commodore: Nicho Waton

   • First thanking everyone who has volunteered this summer.
   • Thanking volunteers who have cooked for Open House / GMM
   • Introducing Mo Johnson León as our new Pedagogy Chair
   • A film shoot for ESPN that happened at the club: windsurfing lesson, on the water practice, 5 different testimonials. The result will probably be visible in October. We will send out an update as soon as we hear more.
   • Update on J-Dock. Next big development will be City Council reviewing and voting.
   • Congratulations to all new recent seniors, Nicole, Alice, Luis!

9. Treasurer: not present, report provided below

10.   Chair Report: Pedagogy Chair, Mo Johnson

    • We piloted CSC's first Teach-Along on 7/24. About 8 boats consisting of an intructor-trainer, an instructor-mentee and one novice sailor practiced small circles.
    • We will repeat this format at a TBD date in September to continue to build instructor training opportunities.
    • The survey following the Women's Fast Track showed significant increase in confidence, belonging and participation in women instructors at CSC.
    • This supports CSC's goal of gender equity and support for instructors.

3. Member Items: Comments/Questions

   1. A member wished to speak in favor of more beer. The member indicated his enjoyment of post fast track beer, and grief that less beer has been present in the last two years. The member closed with a request for a renewed commitment to beer.
   2. Reminder that the live COB advanced dinghy session is tomorrow, 8/26!

4. Treasurer Report

Quarterly Statement of Financial Condition August 1 2024

As of this date we had $42,501 in the bank accounts, up $5,977 from 5/1/24.  We also had $11,184 in a Series I savings bond, and expected reimbursement of about $32,000 from the Division of Boating and Waterways (DBW) under our current grant for items we’ve already paid for.  Regular membership dues for the quarter were 7% higher than the average of dues in the same quarter of the previous three years.

Big thanks to everyone who worked hard for the club!