2009 Fleet 9 AGM

Thanks to Doug for putting together the below write-up of this weekend's Fleet 9 AGM:



Fellow 505ers and Friends:

We had a most enjoyable evening Saturday at Doug and Marie McKeige's house for our year end Fleet 9 party and Annual General Meeting. There were 25 or so of us -- a nice turn out. Those of you who were not able to attend -- here is a report:

1. I was elected co fleet captain with our other new co fleet captain, Ted Ferrarone (elected in absentia). While we have plenty of willing and enthusiastic fleet members, the thinking was that I could help coordinate things with AYC and Ted can do the same with LYC and also especially help with fleet development among the folks who have come out of school and working/living in the metropolitan area. This new arrangement has come about because our great friend and leader John Wyles and his beautiful and wonderful wife Sally are relocating to their home in Ireland. John is, of course, irreplaceable and so we will all need to rally our energies to take advantage of the solid foundation and huge momentum that John has brought us. THANKS AGAIN JOHN WYLES!!! The good news is that John expects to be in the U.S. on a regular basis going forward and we will see plenty of him in the future.

In this spirit, Olav Schluter agreed to take on responsibility for our fleet loaner boat, 8464. Keith Longson said he will work on trying to get a better turn out from AYC members for fleet sailing. Carina Prakke-McCabe said she's interested in helping with the 2011 505 NAs organization (which we all are going to have to work on with the help of other E. Coast 505 sailors.)

2. Schedule: A lot of time was spent on this. The big events in 2010 are the 505 Worlds in Aarhus Denmark from July 25 to August 5. There appears to be strong interest for this and there will most certainly be an E. Coast container going over. The 505 North American Championship is Chicago, tentatively scheduled now for June 23 to 27. I'm not sure those dates are set and there was some concern about whether a container could be packed after that event and make it to Denmark in time for the Worlds.

Midwinters. There is strong interest in the midwinters and John W indicated his view that we should be able to load a tractor trailer (which can take upward of ten or eleven boats) at AYC and have it stop and pick up additional boats at Hampton, where a few of our fleet will be after the Hampton regatta this coming weekend. (John has been emailing on this subject).

After Midwinters, there was discussion about trying to do a training session or two in Miami with some help from Augie and Ethan in terms of a venue.

There will likely be a regatta at Hampton Virginia in early April and then the West River regatta in late April. We then currently plan to have the Larchmont Memorial Day regatta. There will likely be a Wickford regatta in early June and perhaps a regatta later in June at Beach Haven NJ on Long Beach Island. There was discussion around the fact that many fleet members spent so much time sailing at other venues that local participation suffered. There was also discussion around the need to balance local sailing with support for other E. Coast venues. We won't have the benefit of them sailing with us if we don't go to sail with them. We are going to look at trying to have at least one more local weekend event to add to the schedule. At the same time, it is a real plus if we can travel closer distances (like Wickford and Beach Haven) where we can have a better shot at breeze and where the travel time isn't so onerous. After June, as mentioned, there are the NAs at Chicago and the Worlds at Denmark. We should be good to go again this year for the Buzzards Bay Regatta in early August. There will likely be an event in September (perhaps a local one) and then we will have the HPDO in early October.

The schedule will be set over the coming months after discussions with the schedule coordinators for New England (Sol Marini and mid Atlantic Henry Amthor). We will keep you posted.

3. New Boats. Loic Bleuez indicated that he is interested in purchasing Xavier's boat. Loic attended Saturday and he lives in Morristown NJ. He is interested in finding somebody who could crew for him (correct?). We have a lot of boats locally now, so anybody out there who wants to skipper or crew should not have trouble finding a way to get something figured out. Let's all show some iniative on this.

4. 505 NAs October 2011. This is a four day event scheduled for the weekend in October 2011 after the HPDO. Joerg, who just finished organizing the J105 NAs at AYC said it is a lot of work. Fortunately, we have at AYC a pretty enthusiastic and able group of RC personnel which is a great place to start. We are going to need a ton of additional pieces. For the time being, Ted, Doug, Carina, Kevin (with some advice from Joerg and John W) will get on top of this.

That's about all I've got.

Best,
Doug McKeige