CSC ExCom Rolling Agenda 

 Aug 25, 2024 through March 7th, 2025

Mar 7th 2025

Passed motion to approve Senior Project for Fast Track co-coordinators: Claire Perhach, Daniel Brazil, Jessica Synder, Jay Karimi, Sarah Peach, Emma Chrisman, Marley Salangsang

Yes: 

Feb 26th 2025

Passed Motion to Authorize $10,000 additional spending this fiscal year for Dinghies and Rescue Skiffs

General Membership Meeting (February 22, 2025)

Meeting minutes

Feb 19th 2025

Passed motion to approve and publish OR changes

@Ryan A, @Marco Falcioni, @Memo, @Shreyas, @Peter, @John Bongiovanni, @Nicho, @Birk, @Isha, @Sofi, @Mariya - she/her, @Robert Spark, @Dennis Tai

Jan 30th 2025

Passed Motion by john to approve OR changes to implement Senior Keelboat Only

@Ryan A, @Marco Falcioni, @Memo, @Shreyas, @Peter, @John Bongiovanni, @Nicho, @Birk, @Isha, @Sofi, @Mariya - she/her, @Robert Spark, @Dennis Tai

Jan 24th 2025

Passed Motion to approve Thibault de Poyferre's Senior Project - Advanced Dinghy Coordinator

Voted Yes: @Sara Zimmerman, @Nicho, @Shreyas, @John Bongiovanni, @Birk, @Marco Falcioni, @Peter, @Memo, @Mariya - she/her, @Robert Spark, @Isha, @Randi

Jan 8th 2025

Motion to approve Tanja Geis's senior project to develop a membership survey to measure member satisfaction and learning, including how the identities of members affect their experience of CSC, with an eye to actionable findings.

Voted Yes: @Sara Zimmerman, @Nicho, @Shreyas, @John Bongiovanni, @Birk, @Marco Falcioni, @Peter, @Memo, @Mariya - she/her, @Robert Spark, @Isha, @Randi

Jan 2nd 2025

Change ORs to implement changed membership fees approved by membership at the GMM May 2024. Specific changes are here (changed items highlighted)

https://calsailingclub.slack.com/files/U92JHVAUA/F087H5UGL5P/or_changes.pdf?origin_team=T88SLK0DP&origin_channel=C8A8L5L3Y

Voted Yes: @Memo, @Sofi, @Shreyas, @Marco Falcioni, @Nicho, @Birk, @Peter, @Dennis Tai, @Randi, @Robert Spark, @Isha, @Ryan A, @Sara Zimmerman, @Mariya - she/her, @Ted DeBonis

Dec 30th 2024

Passed:

Sr project for Ezra Gaskin to coordinate between the City and Cal Sailing Club during permitting and initial plan preparation regarding CSC 's needs for grading, paving, fencing, gate(s), and provision for future connections for sewer, fire hydrant, potable water, and electricity.

Voted Yes: @Peter, @Dennis Tai, @Marco Falcioni, @Memo, @Nicho, @Shreyas, @John Bongiovanni, @Mariya - she/her, @Robert Spark, @Birk, @Sara Zimmerman, @Isha, @Ted DeBonis

Nov 14th 2024

 Motion to grant James Clarkson and Adam Rinder a life time membership as a thank you for their contribution to the club during their Excomm terms.

Passed Unanimously

Nov 12th 2024

The motion is a bit long, so I will present it here, then do the Polly.

Motion to approve in principle a Keelboat Only Senior rating. What this means is a rating available to Junior Skippers which grants them Keelboat Senior privileges. A Senior Dinghy test would not be required, but two Senior Keelboat tests by two different Rating Committee members would be required. All other Senior requirements would remain.

If the motion passes, the Commodore should appoint a group to develop a detailed proposal for this. (edited) 

Passed Unanimously

October 30th 2024

Motion to approve Robert Spark's senior dinghy rating. He has completed 2 dinghy tests and his project.

Passed Unanimously

October 19th 2024

Motion to approve Senior Project for Joel Beazer - 2025 Senior Study Group Coordinator

Passed Unanimously

Sept 28th 2024

Motion to approve Senior windsurfing project for Seven Lee -Lesson coordinator

Passed Unanimously

Sept 24th 2024

Motion to approve Shreyas Chand's senior dinghy rating. He has completed 2 dinghy tests and his project.

Passed Unanimously

Move to approve Julian Aveling's Sr Skipper project which is to coordinate inputs from excommies and chairs for the grant application to Division of Boating and Waterways (DBW) which is due 10/25/2024

Passed Unanimously

Sept 22nd 2024

Approve Jeff Lewis as a Keelboat cruising skipper

Passed Unanimously

Sept 1st 2024

Motion to approve Anton Serputko’s senior windsurfer rating. He completed all the requirements with excellence!!

Passed Unanimously

Aug 29th 2024

Approve Sailing Senior Project for Rick Merlau. PDF proposal in comments

https://calsailingclub.slack.com/files/UQLR4UJ7R/F07KV2LV1GQ/dinghyrepairworkshoprm20240829.pdf

Passed Unanimously

Aug 28th 2024

*motion to approve Senior Dinghy rating for Matteson Daniel*

Passed Unanimously

November GMM Officer Reports

Commodore Report

Huge thank you to Isha, Berkeley Yacht Club, chefs and the volunteers for making this holiday GMM such a success! 

Thank you to Nicho, Camille, Robert, Sara, Shreyas and many more for the huge success in maintaining CSC berths at J-dock in Berkeley Marina.  There was wide support on the Council, thanks to probably more than a hundred of personal letters that were sent by members and supporters. We were also able to take many of them out for a sail, and some of them are very tempted to start taking lessons. Many club members showed in person and online yesterday (and at many other meetings). There is a recording online.  

It was also really nice to raise awareness about community sailing, and the fact that anyone can get on the water through this community and learn to sail.

Thank you to our racing chairs! Racing this year has been a great success! 

Vice Commodore Report

We're excited to share some highlights from our Open House events this year:

• We held 7 Open Houses from April to October, which is just one less than last year.

• Total rides reached 1,586—our highest turnout since 2019!

• Adult rides: 1,247, also the highest since 2019.

• Child rides: 339.

• For the first time, we had two Open Houses exceeding 300 attendees (in April and August).

Other Highlights

• We’ve made ongoing improvements to our kitchen operations to ensure our volunteers stay well fed.

• On average, we had over 50 volunteers at each Open House. Volunteer efforts made these events run smoothly, and we truly appreciate the dedication of everyone involved.

Thank you to everyone for making this season a success!

First Vice

James is stepping down from excom after 8 years and Robert Spark is joining the first vice team in his place. Thank you James!

As you may now, we can no longer purchase JY15s, so we have been testing boats to start planning for an eventual replacement. Please give us a holler if you have any thoughts

Fleet is in good shape, thank you to all the volunteers for keeping up with repairs.

Lets be gentle with masts, it took us 8 months to get replacements but they're finally stateside so we're relatively well stocked.

As always, let us know if you have any questions, concerns or thoughts

Second Vice

First of all our windsurfing equipment is in good standing and ready for a new season.

Adam Rinder stepped down from Co-Second Vice position. Thanks Adam for everything you did to keep the fleet in good shape.

Created 2 new chair positions 

Youth windsurfing lessons coordinator and sherman island trips coordinator.

7 senior projects have been completed and 3 new inaugurated seniors: Anton Serputko, Burhan Altunel and Ivan Bankov 

Spent $15k of our budget then we had a budget freeze hopefully temporary.

New novice sails brand (S2 Dragon) to support our school program after the close down of Sailworks.

We did a few work parties which had a great turnout. We wanted to thank all our volunteers, we won’t be able to do all that work without you.

Third Vice

The Winch clinic went well, thanks to everyone who came out, we had a great turnout!
4 boats are due for a bottom job at the same time, so they’re going to be going in back to back.  There will be one boat or another missing from J dock for a while.
Doctor Who is DNS’d for new standing rigging.  We have the new rigging on hand and will be scheduling a time to step the mast soon.
We are trying to get more people involved in keelboat maintenance, so keep an eye out in the #keelboats channel on Slack.  When something comes up that needs done, we’ll post in there to see if anyone can help/handle it.

Port Captain

• We have coverage scheduled through  the beginning of January, and will be working on the Spring schedule in the next few weeks.

• We are back in a period of problematic tides for the next few months, please check the resources: Open/Close times section on the website or the club status page before heading down.

• While winter weekends are generally not as hectic as Spring/Summer/Fall weekends, they are a good time to consider learning the ropes of club operations while assisting our day leaders. If you are interested in being a DL assistant please reach out to the port captains, and if you are already a DL assistant please remember to grab weekend mid-day shifts to stay sharp while we wait for things to pick back up.

Treasurer Report

Quarterly Statement of Financial Condition November 1 2024

As of this date we had $41,436 in the bank accounts, down $1,065 from 8/1/24. We also expected reimbursement of about $4,000 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 12% lower than the average of dues in the same quarter of the previous three years. 

Big thanks to everyone who worked hard for the club! 

Rear Commodore for Sailing Report

CSC GMM November 14, 2024

I’m a numbers guy, and I look at our instruction programs through that lens. The pandemic was

a big event, so I look at how we’re doing now compared to pre-pandemic, same period in 2019.

So this time it’s the last 3 months compared to the same period in 2019.

On the dinghy side we’re teaching about the same number of students on Saturdays, but,

contiinuing a trend for the past while, we’re teaching a lot more students on weekdays. I don’t

know why, but we have a lot of students on Mondays now. The great news is that we also have

a lot of instructors showing up. Thanks to you for that. And remember that you can log double

hours for teaching dinghy on weekdays.

We are working on Teach Along sessions to help develop instructors. The idea is that you go out

with three people in a boat to practice teach a specific skill, like COB. One is a very experienced

instructor, one is a relatively recent Junior who wants to learn to teach it, and the third is a

novice student who wants to learn it. We did this to prepare for the Women’s Fast Track last

summer, and we found it to be a very powerful approach. We are trying to figure out how to do

it on a regular basis.

Speaking of Fast Track, there will be an All Women’s Fast Track next year. It worked really well.

On the keelboat side, Wednesday night lessons are working well, thanks primarily to Liang

Chow, who has been coordinating them, and also, of course, to the instructors who have been

teaching them. We are now satisfying 90% of the demand for these lessons, which means 90%

of the lessons signups actually get a lesson, as opposed to fewer than 50% a couple of years

ago.

We had a great year for Seniors. 5 members earned the Senior Dinghy rating and one earned

the full Senior rating (dinghy and keelboat). I’ll note that this year’s class was the most diverse

we’ve seen, including two women, one an 18 year old Czeck.

I do want to talk about Senior. It’s a difficult rating and a great accomplishment when you get it.

There is an aura about it which discourages some members from going for it. If you want to get

it, I suggest reaching out to senior members you know to mentor you, on and off the water. I

and others are available for this.

We have a Cruise Study Group finishing next week, organized by Cesare Garlati, to help

members pass the rigorous written test for that rating and in general to be able to plan cruises

in the bay. A Senior Study Group will start in February to teach the knowledge required for the

Senior Rating. Joel Beazer is the coordinator, and he is way ahead of the game in planning it.

As always, I will conclude by thanking all of the instructors who have kept our sailing program

going at a very high level.

Rear Commodore for Windsurfing Report

This season:

• We continued the work we were doing over the past two seasons to increase consistency of Novice instruction via instructor courses and specified class progressions, including the three-class Novice sequence 

• We scheduled testing sessions to make sailing tests feel more accessible—thanks to Cindoll for doing that testing this year.

• Scheduled and staffed intermediate level classes

• John developed some great tools to allow us to manage instructor staffing through the event system as well as to send out automated messages to students and instructors, which helps streamline organization significantly. Very excited to have that for next season.

• We formalized two new chair positions: the Field Trip Coordinator, which Christine Page ably handled, and the Youth Windsurfing Chair, co-chaired this season by Julien Traisnel and James Peroulas. They did awesome and it is great to have that in action. We need to revive our women's windsurfing program next season, let me know if you're interested in pitching in there. 

2024: Offered 132 classes this year, with about 800 students. That represents about 800 volunteer hours—thanks to each and every member who contributed their time and expertise in teaching. And thanks to everybody who helped pitch in when I was out, Steven Lee in particular.

Overall, we saw less demand this year for our classes, Novice I classes in particular, with 297 new Novices joining the sport, down 14% from last year but on par with previous years. Unclear if last year was a blip of some kind or if we were impacted by general trends this year (increase in summer travel or the like). We offered fewer Novice I classes (40) as demand was lower and we only had a few oversubscribed classes at that level.

We continued to invest in intermediate classes and saw a bump in members who earned their Junior and J+ ratings, with some long-time Novice members returning to windsurfing and earning their Junior rating! These ratings were up 17/18% over last year but these trends are pretty lumpy and not that meaningful to track. Offering intermediate classes help, but I suspect that social encouragement of Seniors and more established club members has a big impact on folks pursuing intermediate ratings, so keep doing all you do to help our less experienced windsurfers out and keep encouraging them to take on the next rating!

Secretary Report

No report.

Meeting Notes

GMM Notes Aug 25, 2024

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 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!

Co-commodores 

• Thank you as always to all the volunteers!