Note: There will be no December newsletter...the webmaster is off to the Caribbean for Christmas. However, the Winter Series and BOTY standings are up to date as of December 8th.

Happy Holidays!

In the last two races on the Neuse we have had incidents of boats making contact during a race. In both cases no other boats were in the vicinity and with less aggressive, or smarter sailing contact could have been avoided. Furthermore, it was very disturbing to see the aggressive and disrespectful treatment of the RC after the race. Keep in mind that while sailing can be intense and very competitive, the over arching goal should be to be safe and have fun. Please show your competitors and the race officials more respect or someone will get seriously hurt and we will not be able to recruit anyone to do race committee in the future.

Over the Oct 14 to 16 weekend PSC hosted the Hospice Cup which was pretty well attended by Neuse River boats. About 10 boats from NYRA or BSC made the trip to Bath and enjoyed some perfect racing weather. Some boats also enjoyed to great racing, unfortunately the boat I was on was not one of them. Nevertheless, the racing was fun, PSC did a great job hosting the event with plenty of good food and cold beer, and I didn't end up with two broken ribs from an autopilot malfunction (send excess Ibuprofen and duct tape to Eddy Parker).

The BOTY standings have been updated. Note that the BOTY standings have a minor correction to reflect that Compass Rose is not actually a NYRA member. This correct did not have a significant affect on the BOTY leaders.

ODC hosted the Neuse Solo on Oct 1. This is not a BOTY race, but NYRA did have a good turnout with about seven members racing in some challenging single hand conditions of 15 to 20 knot winds. Once again it was a fun race and if you haven't tried single hand racing, you are missing out on a fun and rewarding way to race.

The Winter Series and Halloween racing starts on Oct 29. This year the Race Committee will be comprised of seven boats and crews that have volunteered to sit out a race in order to do RC duty. Hopefully we will all learn a lot from this experience and will better appreciate the RCs at future events. Perhaps we will find some people that like RC and want to volunteer for future events.

The Winter Series social schedule is:

• Oct 29 -- Dave and Leigh Pfefferkorn (invitation)
• Nov 12 -- Mike and Diane Foster Oyster Bash
• Dec 3 -- Gary and Janice Peterson
• Dec 17 -- Mike and Joy Evens (also NYRA election night)
• Jan 14 -- TBD
• Jan 28 -- TBD

Finally, as the end of the year approaches, we will be building a slate of candidates for the 2006 board and looking for Crew of the Year nominees. If you are interested in any board positions for next year please let me know. Skippers also need to send nominations for the COTY as all nominations come from the NYRA members and I am sure that most of the boats would be much slower without crews to keep the skippers going.

We plan to review the BOTY rules and events for 2006 later this year. If you have any suggestions for improvement in that, or anything that NYRA does, please let me know.