The Throckmorton’s & Underhill’s Enjoying Subsidized Dining at the Yacht Club
It’s coming to Annual Meeting season, the time of year where club members gather to argue the spending of relative nickles and dimes for the purpose of supporting their favored segment of their club.
I’ve always thought process was sort of funny - relatively wealthy people (both Dems and Repubs in the US) talking like socialists, acting like communists, who all really just want to be the Monarch.
The vast majority of large facility clubs with big restaurants have a monthly tax beyond the dues to support the overhead of keeping a private waterfront restaurant, with generally marginal quality food, open. OK, I like nice places as much as the next guy, but why does it seem that it is generally easier to get money to support a money losing operation that was an afterthought when the club was created, than it is to get the most basic of things to run the sailing program – especially the junior sailing program. The answer is obvious – the membership dynamics of clubs have changed – the average age of some clubs I go to seems to rooted somewhere south of Pleistocene era, and those members only care about the food and beverage facilities of the club.
But another part of the problem is the way sailing is presented at an Annual Meeting – that is if it is presented at all. Sure, we all need to know about P&L for the club operations, but when was the last time anyone has heard of a club annual meeting spending any significant time talking about the product it is really suppose to produce – days of sailing for members and their guests?
In the snow ski biz, the primary barometer of facility use is “skier days” – meaning in a general sense the number of lift tickets purchased. Yacht Clubs ought to also talk in terms of “Sailor Days” – one prime measure being the total number of people who crossed the starting line through the season.
The Underhill’s have said told me that they will be buying a round on the house for any club who calculates the success of their season this way.
Nice people, those Underhill’s.
September 14, 2006 at 6:10 pm
If you don’t like the way dining clubs masquerading as yacht clubs are run, then don’t join a club like that. There are plenty of sailing clubs around that focus on sailing.
I have belonged to 5 different sailing clubs over the past 25 years. All of them had an active racing program, good outreach to new members, and an enthusiastic bunch of juniors. Not one of them had a fancy yacht club restaurant that was subsidized by the members. Some had snack bars that provided simple food after racing, some didn’t even had that so we had barbecues and picnics, or ordered in pizza, or a volunteer heated up some pasta in the kitchen.