In Saturday November 5th, the SLSC Banquet took place in the beautiful dining room of the Country Club of North Carolina (CCNC). The SLSC Board is very grateful to the CCNC for making their facilities available to our Club. Almost 50 members attended this final social activity of our Sailing Club in 2016. Photos of the event are available here.

SLSC Members:

Welcome to our new website. Beyond the new "facelift", we needed to update the site's core programs, which has enhanced the website's security and functiionality and to move it to a new server for additional enhanced security.  The biggest improvement is that the website is responsive to the device looking at it. This should make viewing on cell phones, tablets and other handheld devices much easier.  We have also added other functionalities which you might find helpful as well.

Some of those enhancements include:

1. Responsive design, which means that the site should reshape itself to accommodate the device you're using to view it.
2. Registration which simultaneously
   1. Creates a Profile for you and adds your information to the Club's Membership list,
      (The membership list is a full featured list for every member. You can enter as much or as little information as you choose. One big advantage is the ability to directly contact other Members. The list is available only to the Club's registered Members.)
   2. The Profile is editable by you,
      (Should you change a phone number, email address, the type of boat you have , your volunteer interests, etc. you can change them directly via the profile editor.)
   3. Subscribes you to the Club's newsletter, "SLSC's Member Newsletter", and
      (You will automatically be subscribed to the "SLSC Member Newsletter"; however, there are three other newsletters directed to specific groups: "Race Skippers", "Small Boat Skippers"  and "Power Boat Skippers" . Choose all or none, it's up to you. Change them at any time. By the way, all subscribers will receive announcements about social events)
   4. Registers you for Annual Membership in the Seven Lakes Sailing Club.
      (Part of the registration process includes agreeing to the Club's Terms of Use. You will still need to sign and send the Release of Liability form with your Annual Membership Dues before your membership will be activated for the new year. Until activation you will not have access to the Members side of the site or any of the Club's activities.)
3. Able to directly create For Sale items on the site.
   (Once you've registered or "Create an Account" on the site, you will be able to access this feature through the "User Menu" section of the site.)
4. A new "Emergency Notice" and "Important Notice" announcements prominently displayed for last minute event or general site changes.
5. New display software for our Photo Albums which displays across all platforms, in particular Apple products.

We've spent a lot of time trying to find and fix any glitches, however there is a chance some have been missed. We are asking for your help. If you run across any problems, no matter how trivial, such as:

1. the site doesn't rearrange properly or appears strange on your mobile device,
2. a function is broken,
3. some difficultly in doing what's needed to do what you want to,
4. any content typos or grammatical errors,
5. any questions you have that are not covered by the FAQ section of the website,
6. any suggestions that might help the usability of the site,
7. other content that you think would benefit the Members, or
8. anything we've not thought of,

please email the Webmaster. If presenting a problem, it will be very helpful if you take a minute to detail what happened, what page you were on, what you were trying to do, what your viewing device was, the Internet browser you were using, etc. More information is always better.

It is worth noting that although the site has been optimized for mobile devices the gallery images have not. Images can be large data files, so individuals with limited data plans may want to view the photo galleries on devices without data restriction cell phone plans.

We would like to thank all of those involved editing and helping "polish" the site.

This is a complex website with many "moving parts". We apologize for any inconvenience, but with your help we can make one of the best. Thank you in advance.

Bert van Domselaar
Commodore

The 3rd and final race of the 2016 Commodore’s Cup was held on Saturday, October 22. Due to the extreme wind conditions, several captains in the fleet chose to remain ashore for safety reasons. Four boats checked in at Johnson’s Point to race at 1 pm; Gerhard Hergenhan and Dan Blue in their J22’s, Yvonne Short in the Hunter 22, and Gerry Van Wageningen in the Flying Scot. All the captains were carrying extra crew onboard. Wind conditions were reported from the start line at 12 gusting to 16; however Paul Kirst reported gusts to 21 from the other end of the lake.

We  have created a new "Links" category, "Internet Image Portfolio" for any member who has a shared image account like "Photobucket", "Facebook", "Flickr", "Google+ Photos", "Google Direct", etc. Ben Benjamin has offered to share his "Google Direct" account showing, as of today, two of the SLSC races. You will find them on the site at this address: Internet Image Portfolios.

If you have photos of any Seven Lakes Sailing Club events or activities you would like to share with the membership, send a link to the Webmaster. Thank you.

The fluky winds of Lake Auman again tested the resolve of the sailors in Saturday’s second of three Commodore Cup races. Six of the largest boats showed up to race. Now that the water is too cold for a dunking, the smaller capsizable boats typically don’t race.

Winds were predicted to be 6 mph, which would have been fine for sailing. And the winds actually started out close to that until the starting horn blew and then we all sat there on the starting line looking for even the slightest movement of air. At some point during the two hour race the wind came from every possible direction, even though it was predicted to be from the northeast. Because of these variations, positions changed drastically from one mark to the other.

Yvonne Short in her Hunter 22, who gave us all a good spanking in the first cup race, had a contentious start and then fell into a hole (got becalmed) along with a couple of other boats on their way to the first mark but got close to the first group by the second mark. The wind shifts and availability of wind favored the boats which were already in the lead which were Dan Blue and Gerhard Hergenhahn in their J-22’s and Paul Kirst in a Hunter 216.

Paul and Dan ended up almost neck and neck approaching the finish with Dan crossing first by 5 seconds (over a race of 90 minutes!). Dan received line honors and placed third in corrected time. Paul won by 26 seconds in corrected time. The Commodores Cup race is a special race in which crossing first receives an award with another award for winning in corrected time. Since it is a series of three races the winners of the cups will not be decided until the final race next week Saturday, October 22nd. The start will be from Johnson’s Point at 1 PM.

Paul Kirst

The first race in the Commodore Cup series was held on Saturday, October 1. Different from last week’s race, this race had gusty but sufficient wind (5-7 mph). The start from Johnson’s Point with the nine participating sailing boats was not easy with the constantly changing wind directions. Yvonne Short with her Hunter 22 and Gerry Van Wageningen with his Flying Scot took directly distance from the group. Gerry sailed the Flying Scot by himself without a crew and did very well, which is remarkable under the wind conditions of the day. However, the Hunter 22 of Yvonne was too fast for him. She finished first with 3 minutes ahead of the Flying Scot and more than 6 minutes ahead of the rest of the boats. An excellent performance!
The next race of the Commodore Cup series will be held next week Saturday, October 8 at 1 PM starting from Johnson’s Point.

The race on Saturday September 24 was an eventful one. First of all, there was hardly any wind (0-3 mph). Although only a small course was set out on the lake, it took most of the skippers almost 90 minutes to go around the marks. The first amazing event was that Dan Blue with his J-22, who was late and was at least 100 yards behind the field of boats at the start, managed to move himself into the middle of the field by the first mark. Because of the little wind the boats stayed very close together. When they moved around the marks it looked more like a slowly moving raft-up party instead of a sailing boat race. It caused a number of rules infractions which were solved on the spot by the skippers with penalty 360 degrees turns of the boats at fault. The Flying Scot of skipper Gerry Van Wageningen was the first one to pass the finish. However, after applying the handicaps, it was skipper Bruce Keyser with his Mariner who won the race. Bruce Keyser is also the overall winner of the Fall series races. The complete race results are in the Race Results section.

On 1 October at 1 PM, the first Commodore Cup series race will take place. This race will start from Johnson’s Point and can be perfectly watched from there.

On Saturday, September 10th, the 2nd race of the Fall series was held. Eight boats reported for the race ranging from the small 13 foot Sunfish to the 22 foot J-22. After a close finish, the J-22 with skipper Dan Blue passed the finish line as first before the Hunter 216 of skipper Paul Kirst. However, because of the applied handicaps to the boats, the Hunter 216 won this Fall series race. The next race will be on September 24th.

We had our Lobster fest on Saturday evening in the Community Center. It was a great succes
with 90 people attending! The lobsters were as usual outstanding, and we all had a great time.
Thank you for coming out to this fantastic event.
I would like to thank all the volunteers who contributed to this successful evening.
Jean Downer took some great pictures of the event. Click here and look for Lobster Fest to see
them.

Bert van Domselaar,
Commodore

Small sailing boat tour On Saturday July 2, a tour on the lake was organized for the small sailing boats. All participants had a great time. The next event for the small sailing boats will be on July 16. Photos of the event are here.

Today, Saturday June 25, the Seven Lakes Sailing Club held its first races in the Summer Series. The results are available here. Some photos of the races have been published as well. Click here to see them.

The Seven Lakes Sailing Club Sailing School took place from  June 13th to 17th. The following students have successfully completed the sailing class: Claude Pilotte, Lea-Anne Pilotte, Margaret Sheroff, Becky Graham and Sharon Kallio. Congratulations to them! The instructors were Bill Mamel, Paul Kirst, Bert van Domselaar and Ray Taylor.