GMM Minutes: Feb 28, 2026

Type of Meeting: Nonvoting 

Agenda

1. Reports from Officers

1. Commodore: Shreyas Chand

• New officer since last GMM: Scott Snow as co-Treasurer

• Reminder of current officers, including newly voted officers at last GMM

• New pedagogy co-chair: Emma Chrisman (alongside Mo Johnson)

• Operating Rules have been updated. No material rules changes this time; primarily cleaned up some grammar/typos and updated sections to reflect existing practices/fleet (e.g. added lasers and c420 to list of boats requiring checkout).

• Upcoming - further changes to ORs (potentially with material changes) and By Laws (to reflect existing practices).

• No updates, but top of mind issues with city: Parking, Lease, Structure Permitting, Ferry development impact

• Member spotlight: Cesare Garlati completed 6 day single handed passage from Gibraltar to Tenerife. He sends his congratulations and thanks to CSC for  helping him accomplish this incredible feat by teaching him almost everything he knows about sailing and navigation.

Comment from member (Ben) re new space: wasn’t this originally ours anyways?  Not reflected in last lease.

2. Vice Commodore (Open Houses): Isha Mishra, Dennis Tai

• We’ll be sending a form for open house ideas from club members soon. 

• This year we will Transition to a digital waiver system. 

• Dates set for open house and are on the website. Skippers should review updated reminders and requirements for  for open house skippers. 

• Secretary and vice comm are updating cards with club info. Once we have cards printed, we would love for members to take them and give them to their communities. 

• Dawson is sticking around to be banquet chair in 2026!

3. First Vice Commodore (Dinghies): Robert Spark, Memo Gunay

• The boat yard layout will be revised now that the yard foot print has grown in size, we'll update the diagram that's been posted around the yard and on slack to account for this.

• A c420 rigging guide in progress, if interested in contributing, please reach out to first-vice@. In meantime, please post in the lessons-on-demand slack channel about getting a C420 rigging lesson from someone already signed off if you don't understand some questions in the online test.

• If any boat parts are in low supply, there's QR code on the desk in dinghy shed that you can use to request missing parts, and we'll try to include them in our next order.

• There's quite a few open issues in the dinghy log right now, please keep up the good work on repairing these issues promptly and keeping our fleet in the green. In a few months, we'll host another dinghy repair day where we'll teach how to repair different dinghy issues while also trying to knock out most open issues in the log. Stay tuned.

4. Second Vice Commodore (Windsurfing): Sofien Sehiri, Ted DeBonis

• We’re on standby for the big spring cleanup as the trash removal didn’t resume yet.

• In the meantime we’re doing small work parties to prepare for the season, although most of the work was already done at the end of last season.

• New novice, junior  and J+ boards total of 14 boards are in the house. Larger sails total of 10 arriving mid March and accessories and hardware all in stock.

5. Third Vice Commodore (Keelboats):  Ryan Alder

• We have a new electric outboard for one of the merits that we got on environmental grants. We are working on logistics of where to store the battery and running the cable to the motor.

• We are working with North sales to get a higher performance main for the merits to bring one of them more in line with how those boats were meant to be sailed. We will see if people prefer that boat over the more calmly rigged merit. We will be looking for feedback once that new sail is on.

• Digital sign out coming soon!

6. Rear Commodore (Teaching): John Bongiovanni/Stephanie Evans (sailing), Randi Shapiro/David Gadarian (windsurfing)

John, Sailing Rear

We’ve just wrapped our cruising study group and kicked off our senior study group. Big thanks to Owen Shea for all his work on the cruising group, and Jeremy Gillespie on kicking off the senior group. 

We have several exciting plans for this year with building even more great programming–all with a goal to upskill our instructors and students along with them. 

• We had our first teach-along the year, where one instructor is mentored by a more experienced instructor as they teach a novice a new skills. This was focused on teaching first time sailors. We’ll be capturing learnings from these teach alongs to share more broadly. Thanks to Emma for organizing this in partnership with Mo. Our next one will be Wednesday, March 25 5:30pm, and will focus on upwind sailing.

• Please reach out to Emma & Mo to participate when the call for sign-ups go out.

• To continue scaling this and supporting instructor education, we’ve started a bi-weekly ‘ride along’ program on Saturdays morning dinghy lessons. We have two boats running in the program with a mentoring instructor assigned to each boat. We’ll evaluate how this is going and if we should expand during the summer. Our goal with the teach-alongs and ride-alongs will be to ensure our newer juniors get support as they start teaching and that all teachers feel like there are ongoing opportunities for development. 

• Please reach out to John B to participate as a teacher/student. 

• We’re working with our women’s chair, Alyssa Lichtenstein, on a series of Women’s+ dinghy repair clinics to create a dedicated space to build confidence and skill among our women/identifying/non-binary members to maintain our dinghy fleet and progress in sailing skills. Big thanks to Waverly for organizing these! 

• We’re working on evolving our sailing instruction and curriculum to be more holistic, rather than task-oriented, especially in fast-tracks. Our goal is to help students and instructors know what the more foundational skills are before we get into more advanced ones. [For instance, students will come to a lesson saying they want to learn crew over board, but can’t yet hold a straight course on close reach.]

• We’re going to have a small committee work on recommendations for how to progress from one skill to the next along with drills and teaching ideas. 

• We plan to test it out in fast-track and possibly Saturday lessons. 

• Note: this is all designed to help augment instruction/add resources for teachers, not force anyone into teaching a certain way. 

• There’s an email out from Stephanie calling for volunteers to try this out - please raise your hand if you want to be involved. 

• Related, we’re going to continue refining  our calibration on junior tests so that instructors and testers are aligned on what ‘good enough’ looks like for key skills like tacking, gybing and crew overboard. 

There’s lots of ways to get involved and we’re excited for the prime sailing season to kick off soon!

Question from member: Are we replacing the JYs with the 420s?  Response: that’s the desire, but the timeline is unclear

Emma Chrisman, Pedagogy: Chair

• Teach alongs (instructor development) will be happening roughly every 6 weeks this year. (Experienced instructor, learning instructor, and novice student all in one boat with a dock talk). We had our first one of the year in February, focused on tips and tricks for first time students and newer instructors. Next one is upwind sailing focus, Wed 3/25. More details will be announced soon for those who want to participate.

Alyssa & Waverly, Women’s/Trans & Diversity Chairs

• Announcing Spring 2026 Dinghy Repair Clinics for and by Women, Non-Binary, & Trans folks!

• Series of Women, Non-Binary, & Trans led dinghy repair clinics to build confidence & skill in assessing & conducting common dinghy repairs. Let's make a dent in the dinghy repair log and have some fun!

• ALL skill levels are welcome. No rating or experience necessary!

Randi, Windsurfing Rear

• Windsurfing classes start April 18 this year, with tide restrictions every other weekend through early June, unfortunately.

• Administratively, documentation of Rear Commodore responsibilities, procedures, and mapping documents in process.

• Ratings Committee Chair Eric Lee working on an updated framework for ratings to guide a revision to the written tests and to provide more clarity on water tests. 

7. Port Captain: Birk Huber, Audrey Yen

• Please welcome the two new day leaders that have come on board since the last meeting, Kenji and Alejandra.

• We are set for DL scheduling on the current winter schedule until the start of may when we will ramp up to summer staffing levels.

• We are starting work on summer scheduling now.

8. Secretary: Sara Zimmerman, Marco Falconi

• Working with Isha to finalize the card for 2026, will have printed soon

9. Treasurer: Scott Snow, Peter Kuhn, not present, report provided below

• Scott Snow: Introduced myself as our new  Co-Treasurer, along with Peter (and Fluffy).

• DBW Grant approved for almost the entire amount requested (~$45k or 25% of CSCs annual expenses.)

• Fiscal quarter ended 2/1/26 had ~$47K revenue and $45k in expenses, which reflects the stability of our finances.

• Emphasized that while our financial picture is important, equally important to our success are the many volunteer hours contributed by all our members, which do not appear in the financials.

Quarterly Financial Report

Member question: will there be a new wetsuit order?  We need more mens.  Response: there are more wetsuits in storage, we can get out if need be.

Planning Chair, Camille Antinori

• We have the next PRW meeting March 11 covered for CSC but if anyone else wants to attend, please do. 

• One action item: the ferry EIR is out and we need 2-3 CSC people to review and meet to discuss whether it would be feasible for CSC to submit any public comments as an organization. I am also working with a group on a separate response - if you want to help that effort, contact me.

Vigorous Discussion re Ferry

• Comments urging engagement on this

• Question: why concerned about ferry? Just parking? Various members spoke to broader concerns 

• Announced: meeting of Berkeley Community Waterfront Coalition on 3/8 at 10 am at yacht club

Donation Chair, Adriana

• Updates