I consider our club to be pretty catamaran friendly.

Here is how we would handle your situation:

• Offer you help if you needed it
• Ask if you intended to leave your boat at the dock for an extended period of time
• If leaving your boat AND you had a good reason to leave your boat, we would move it to an appropriate spot ot of the way
• We would find out when you were coming back and also see if you had proof of membership from your club
• We would also try to comfirm that your club was not just a paper organization

If we let everyone who wants to use our facilities just launch or park their boats at our club, we honestly would not have room for our members. While we try to be hospitable, we are not in the business of giving free service. Our members pay dues to use the facilities. Why should someone who doesn't pay at their own club use our facilities for free?

We DO have a paper yacht club in town. We charge them and their members for using our facilities. The few times we tried to be charitable they overran the place, parking their cars in front of people's boats and generally littering up the place.

So, you see, there are reasons some clubs feel it is necessary to scrutinize attempts to use the property w/o paying. I am not saying that is the case in your circumstance, but it may have had something to do with it.

We also have yacht clubs that try to be exclusive. The idea behind those clubs is that they DON'T want new members. They want to exclude everyone. In most cases, the facilities genuinely belong to the membership and they have no intentions or motivation to share them with anyone except their own private guests. That's life. You got to look at those clubs as if you were beaching your boat in their own private back yard. NO, they don't have to welcome you. YES, they may even call the authorities.

Rudder Club of Jacksonville