February 15, 2021
Dear CLSA members
I thought we should take this opportunity to think about sailing instead of snow. While you may or may not like snow, digging out cars and driveways day after day is not my favorite pastime! I thought it would be a good time to change the zoom backdrop and the picture in our mind’s eye from snow to sailing.
Club leadership has been hard at work preparing for another sailing season. Everyone is hopeful that life will begin to gradually return to what we are more accustomed to as the pandemic gradually comes under control. That hope notwithstanding, we will continue to move forward carefully with opening plans so that we maintain the safest environment for our members.
With this communication we are publishing the CLSA board approved calendar for the season. These events will be published on the events page in club express as in the past, but for your convenience you can also download the calendar in a one-page summary here: 2021 CLSA Season Calendar. We have included all of the events that we have been informed about, and listed fleet regattas as requested by the captains.
I am certain you noticed the change in format of the annual membership renewal invoices. As we described to you in an early January email, we are updating business practices to be more efficient and to keep up with current technology. Moving to an online payment option is just one of those changes. The next change that will impact every member is the management of race and safety duty days and work parties. This year we are using electronic forms to collect your preferred dates and other information.
Included in this email are links to two forms: 1) 2021 Race/Safety Duty and 2) 2021 Work Party.
Click on these links and fill out the information on each form. Your information will be stored electronically and made available to our work party organizer and our race committee chairperson for scheduling purposes. You no longer need to mail anything back to us. The date of your annual membership payment will be added to the data that is recorded to allow for prioritization of your date preferences.
As other commodores before have done, I also want to take this opportunity to let you know what we are focusing on this year. Last year’s board updated the long range plan, and this year’s board started the season by focusing on that plan and identifying key goals to keep the club moving forward in concert with the plan. (I encourage you to also review the plan. It is published on our Club Express website, or for your convenience you can click on this link to download it: Strategic Plan 2020.)
Our first goal for the season is to focus on more training opportunities. Recognizing that everyone’s time is at a premium, and also that there is still some hesitancy in meeting in public spaces, we are focusing on building a training library that will be part of our club express website. In this library we will be adding recorded trainings on topics such as Race committee duty for the common man, vessels operations, rescue procedures, how to set race courses, and other topics. Some of these will be oriented specifically for our newer members and others for current members that are interested in learning more.
A second goal is to continue to keep our infrastructure first rate for the benefit of our members. In that spirit we will be rebuilding pie docks, adding a cover to the kayak racks, cleaning up the boneyard, and implementing a management plan for the camping resources.
Our third goal is to continue to focus on membership. We will be refining our member recruiting program and will be looking to our existing members to reach out to friends and family that have been sailing before, and asking them to come sailing again. Many of us have children that have been through the junior program and then left, or friends that once sailed with us and moved on. This year we want to focus on bringing these ‘wanderers’ back to our sailing family and welcoming them back. This will help us to build our fleets and at the same provide support and assistance for those who join us as sailors.
In closing, I welcome each of you back for another year at Cowan Lake Sailing Association. I am so thankful that my parents introduced me to sailing here many years ago. It is especially rewarding to have my wife and boys enjoying the sport also, not to mention the opportunity to watch our grandchildren grow up playing at the same place that I did as a young CLSA family member. What a treasure we have at this club!