Well, this has been an interesting year. Pandemic, low water, and unfriendly algae have delivered a few body blows. But as a club we seem to be thriving and having fun! I am noting that we have had our Harbor 20 fleet grow from two boats to four boats, and we suddenly have a Weta fleet of three boats. Both are great boats!
Thursday night sailboat racing was hampered by the pandemic and low water levels so participation was down, though much of the season was completed. Racers skipped April and also the last race of the season last week. The race results are posted on the EYC/TYC Joint Race Committee website so you can peruse that at your leisure. The Santanas had to ramp launch each week and the Thistles had quite an adventure launching from the hoists until they finally gave up on that and ramp launched as well. Racing was not easy this year, so congratulations to all the racers; they really do deserve "participation trophies".
A few notes on changes to the EYC Calendar:
We have Work Parties scheduled for September 18 and October 23.
The Steak Bash (September 23) has been cancelled and will likely be rescheduled for the spring.
The September 25 General Membership meeting will be via Zoom and has been moved up to 6:00 pm so as to avoid conflict with the Duck football game.
The Annual Meeting is on Saturday, October 30, 7:00 pm, and we will do that via Zoom just like we did last year.
The Commodore's Ball has been moved to next summer (similar to what we did this spring with the deck party/awards event).
We have a new Media Manager: Jose Vega. Welcome Jose! Jose has been a member of EYC for many years and is a marketing whiz and we are lucky to have him. Much thanks to Karen Nousen who has been doing the job for the last 13 years. The position has evolved from a monthly paper newsletter when Karen started to an all-electronic format with a monthly newsletter, a weekly schedule email reminder, the website design and maintenance, the handbook database maintenance, the Youtube channel, and running the Facebook and Instagram accounts. And probably some other stuff. Yes, she is going to be a tough act to follow.
We had a fire at the club in the early hours of August 30. Club Host Dan Merritt was awakened (at 1:15am) by something and looked out the window to discover a trailer on fire. While Dan's girlfriend dialed 911, he went out to roust any inhabitants in trailers. The local fire department was there in 15 minutes. They put up a valiant effort to stop the spread and kept the damage to trailers in spots #1 to #6. Our condolences to the owners, especially the ones that had sails in their trailers. Much thanks to Dan and also to Ken Martinson who did what he could with a garden hose.
Our insurance agent was out the day of the fire. Damage to EYC property wasn't too bad. We have two trees damaged but fingers are crossed. The apple tree, however, is dead and is scheduled to be removed on Friday, September 17. The unusable fire hose at that end was burned. Two electrical posts were destroyed and there may be some damage to the paint on the C Locker wall. The water feeds to the five trailers were turned off so we could get the rest online. There looks to be slight damage to the two cabanas and perhaps to a couple of boats in the island. Time will tell if anything else pops up. We had the electrician out the day after the fire. He capped stuff and got the rest of the campus back online. We will need him to come back and replace the two electrical posts.
We have asked the five trailer owners to work together to hire a professional cleanup company and they have been doing so and have solicited bids. The cleanup looks like this: a company that specializes in testing comes out and takes soil samples and they test for asbestos and maybe something else. Then they come back and mark any positive spots. Next, the recycler guy comes out and takes away the metal bits for recycling. Then, if there was a positive result on the testing, the asbestos abatement company comes out and takes care of that. Then the contractor comes out and scrapes up the damaged soil and ash. And we start over with a blank slate.
There will be a bunch of suggestions as to what changes we can make to avoid this happening again. Perhaps maintenance requirements, spacing changes, etc. The first change we have begun to think about is changing the insurance requirement to absolutely require insurance and to require a Certificate of Insurance be sent to the club.
This is a great reminder for all the members who have boats, trailers, and other personal property at the club, that insuring your stuff is all your responsibility. And as a few of us have discovered, calling your insurance agent before a fire is a lot more fun than after a fire.