ClubBuzz: President’s Message for August PLUS a message from Molly at PYSF

Transcript of Peter's message:

Hello Everyone and I sincerely hope you and your families are doing well.

I thought it appropriate to do a video from our marina this month.. As well as a fun place to be this reinforces the message that our door social activities are a lot more inherently safe than indoors. 

And thank you again for all your support and understanding for our Grounndbreaking ceremony via Zoom. We obviously would have much preferred to do this in person but given the circumstances made the difficult but right decision. I do hope you enjoyed the brief ceremony and also the video of the new building that we put together. As we said this will be a building we can all be proud of and enjoy. We shall be looking for other milestones during the building process and hope to be able to get together to celebrate those. 

As you know the Planning permit for the Buidling, road and utilities have all been approved. Our Construction drawings for the utilities and the road have been filed with Redwood City. As soon as we get their response we can start work! 

The other topical news is that the groundbreaking created a flurry of new applications. Our membership is now at 87 with 156 members and we have some additional applications in process. This is exciting!

Many of these applications referenced the importance of our partnership with PYSF. It is refreshing to see their activity in the marina during the Summer. Their classes have been oversubscribed and the kids are well managed so masks, social distancing are well respected plus the pleasure of being outdoors on the water. We asked Molly the Director of PYSF to do a short video of the activities as she can ably bring this to ‘life’ in an effective way. This has been posted along with my message.

I thought last weekend showed off the Club at its best with two marvelous outdoor activities. The Friday opera event on E dock was a huge hit and whether you are a big opera fan or not it was stimulating to listen to a few well known Aria’s sung very well and enjoy the moment in the company of friends. And our second Friday Fun Series race saw a great number of boats competing in one of the longest races we have out to the B marker close to San Mateo bridge and back. Congratulations to all who raced that day. August promises even more with two fantastic open air concerts planned on Saturdays in addition to our popular Friday Zoom events.

Thanks to all of you the Club has great momentum which is the result of your participation and enthusiasm together with the leadership of our events team and our racing organizers.

We would welcome feedback on all that we are doing. As well as email or phone feedback I encourage you to take advantage of the SlipStream App where it is very simple to give feedbavk to us. This App has many features for you to use and enjoy so if you have not done so please do load it on to your smart phone. My very best wishes to all. 

Peter

Transcript of Molly's message:

Hello Everyone, Molly Vandemoer here. It’s great to have a chance to update you on all of our activities! This is our first summer operating out of Westpoint Harbor and it has been great to learn the venue, all the nooks and crannies and spots we can sail in. It also has been really nice to meet all of the boaters that are here in the Harbor. 

We have been down here seven days a week since the middle of June. We have kids in some capacity from 9am-8pm, Monday through Friday. And then on the weekends we are running Rec Sailing. During the week we have our kids sailing in little colorful boats called Cubes. The kids slowly graduate into the bigger two-sail, two person boats called FJs and 420s.

We have 14 coaches as part of our staff. They start at High School age (Sophomores and Juniors) all the way to Olympic level race coaches for our kids. On a daily basis we have anywhere from 35-45 kids on site. And they are kept busy all day! The Rec Sailing over the weekend is a great option. It gets our kids out on the water with their moms, dads, friends and it’s a “free sail.” It’s an opportunity to get out on the water, see the bay and explore on their own without the structure of a class.

This summer we have met the challenge of COVID-19 head on. Like all of us, we are living in very different times and to accommodate all of the Health Order restrictions we have refocused all of our class setups. All of our classes are no bigger than 12. Spacing is very important, as you can see from our sign. This is how we remind the kids that while we might be in one group we want to keep distance between each other. And the most important thing all of our kids are adhering to is having buffs on. We are always making sure that all of our kids have masks on of some sort. It has definitely been a challenge to get our summer up and going. But once we got into the routine of things, we realized it was very possible to have a safe and fun summer!

Once our summer finishes in the middle of August, we will be taking a 1-2 week break to regroup. We will then be starting our Fall Season. Again, we will be be here seven days a week in some capacity. We might have one class of 12, or up to 3-4 classes at once depending on it being a weekday or weekend. Our Fall Schedule will be posted online in about a week. As Club members you all will be given advance registration. So stay tuned as Peter and/or Kevin update you on how to get registered. We would love to see your kids or grandkids down here on the water! I look forward to running into you soon down here on the docks! Go PY!!