Photograph by Fabian Pease

The annual Sequoia Yacht Club St. Patrick's Day Party will follow the conclusion of the St. Patrick's Day Race and end of the Winter Series.

Al Montoya will be preparing a traditional corned beef and cabbage dinner. Also featured is music by Point of Order and Murphy's Irish Dancers. This event is an annual highlight of the Sequoia social calendar. Cocktails 5:30 pm, dinner 6:30 pm. Murphy's Irish Dancers 7:30 pm, Point of Order 8:30 pm until 10:30 pm, $15 for adults, $7.00 children under 12, sign up sheet at the club. (The crowd looks to be larger than expected so if you can help with bartending or cleanup please let me know. Also we will be putting up decorations on Saturday morning at 10am; your help will be appreciated.)

The tall ships are in port and the crews will be joining us. Also the Potters Yachters will be cruising in and racing that day as well, so come down to the club, meet the crews and enjoy a great evening and dance a jig or two.

Theresa Howard
Social Chair

Mark your calendars for this year's South Bay Opening Day. If you are interested in helping or putting your boat in the parade and blessing of the fleet, contact our Rear Commodore Dan Lockwood. For more information please visit www.southbayopeningday.org.

The Winter Series comes to a conclusion Saturday, March 16th with race #5. This race doubles as the annual St. Patrick’s Day Race and is run as both an individual race as well as the final Winter Series race. The St. Patrick's Day Race is one of the highlights of the Sequoia racing season, and a bottle of Irish whiskey is up for grabs to the winner of the race in both the spinnaker and non-spinnaker divisions.

The Winter Series races start at 13:00 and the Skippers Meeting will be held at 11:00 on the day of the race. For those boats coming down from CPYC, you can call me at 650-576-3990 after 11:15 for race instructions and then check-in at the start area. Plan on racing rain or shine.

So come up to the club for the final results to be calculated and announced. You may even find yourself enjoying a wee drop of the craythur while toasting the winners and all those participating in the Winter Races.

The evening of the race the Club will be having our annual St. Patrick's Day party so you might want to sign-up and make a full day of it.

Hope to see you there.

Richard Butts
SeqYC Large Sailboat Fleet Captain
http://www.sequoiayc.org/racing

Due to a very special clubhouse presentation by America's Cup, Ben Ainslee, on the 27th of April, the Single Handed Race scheduled for that day has been moved to 13 April. Please mark your calendars and we'll see you on the line.

We had a first and second reading at the March general meeting. Please join me in welcoming these new and prospective members to the club.

Jerry Jones
Membership Chair

This is a genuine welcome to a special DID just for the 2012 new members. You are a VERY important group of people. This was one of those years when we really accelerated membership. We want to know - what did we do right? And what could we have done better?

How was your new member experience? How do we improve the new member recruitment and on boarding this year. (We are anticipating another great year for recruitment!).

You have a lot to tell us! Plus we would also like to properly celebrate your one year anniversary with us.

And if you have questions about any aspect of the club - the flag and officers will be there to answer them! We shall have a great evening but it is all about you. So please come with your ideas and suggestions. Thank you for joining Sequoia YC!

Peter- your Commodore

Everyone is getting excited about Beer Can Racing (BCR) season starting in less than a month. So last weekend, after some initial leg work from our house manager Fabian Pease,  a number of folks came together to replace the old tile counter top in the BBQ area behind the grill. Larry Mayne, with help from several people, installed the new tile, shown in the pictures below. John Graves did the great grout work. We are so very grateful to Larry and John who pitched in when we needed a project like this completed. I can smell those steaks cooking now. Can you?

Our next cruise out will be to Ballena Bay Yacht Club on March 30th and 31st. The Ballena Bay Yacht Club has graciously invited us to their club for dinner on Saturday evening, preceded with a cocktail party in their beautiful bar. Your hosts Nick and Robin Weber have fun planned for the weekend including an Easter egg hunt with really cool prizes inside each egg.

More information will be forthcoming.

On Monday, April 1st, Sequoia Yacht Club has the honor of hosting the April Delegates Dinner for Pacific Inter Club Yachting Association (PICYA). This is a big money maker for the club and a special honor as many clubs vie for the opportunity to host these dinners. We last had the chance to host PICYA during Petra’s year as Commodore. We are lucky that Chef Steve Higgs and his crew have volunteered to prepare the meal!

Thanks Steve!! Petra will be managing the duties at the bar. Thanks Petra!! Thank you to those who have already said you will help out!! However, we need more volunteers to help with set-up and decorations on Sunday, and on Monday evening to help serve the meal, bartend and clean-up.

Set-up and decoration on Sunday will begin at noon and go until we finish (~3 hours depending on help). If you can help serve, the hours on Monday are from 5:00-8:00pm (we might finish earlier), clean-up will be from 7:30-9:30pm. Bartenders will begin service at 5:30 and run until 9:00. Our guests will begin to arrive around 6:00 and the meeting will conclude around 8:00.

Please contact me at kateh@netapp.com if you can lend a hand. This is a big deal for us – please help Sequoia shine as a club!

Warm regards,
Kate Humphreys
Staff Commodore