Westlake Yacht Club in the News

Conejo Valley Life, Feb 18, 2005 Patton Concludes State-wide Campaign In January, Westlake Yacht Club's William H. Patton concluded his one-year term as the 37th president of Recreational Boaters of California (RBOC). RBOC is a nonprofit governmental advocacy organization that works to represent the interests of 40,000 California recreational boating families before the State Legislature and the executive branches of state and local government. Patton is a longtime member of Westlake Yacht Club (WYC). He became a Director of WYC in 1986, served as Commodore of WYC in 1990, Commodore of the Association of Santa Barbara Channel Yacht Clubs (ASBCYC) in 1993, and a Director of the Southern California Yachting Association (SCYA) from 1991 to 1997. He became Honorary Commodore of SCYA in 1997, and has served on the RBOC Board of Directors since 1993. RBOC directors come from a variety of professions: corporate managers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, business owners and engineers, all of whom are avid recreational boaters with impressive accomplishments in Corinthian yachting. (Corinthian yachting is boating for pleasure rather than commercial gain). "Working with RBOC", says Patton, "has been very rewarding and educational." Continuing, he adds "RBOC performs an extremely important service for the California recreational boating community. Without this "watch-dog" presence in Sacramento, recreational boaters would be burdened with excessive fees and regulations. RBOC not only opposes legislation that is bad for recreational boating, they also sponsor legislation needed to preserve the great pass time of Corinthian yachting." According to Patton, up to four thousand bills are introduced into the Assembly and Senate during each two-year legislative cycle. RBOC reviews each bill for its impact on recreational boating. Legislators sometimes try to increase recreational boating fees, in bills that provide no benefit to boaters, solely to fund the costs of their bills. Laws proposed by special interest groups that adversely effect recreational boating are also sometimes included in innocuous looking bills. Patton's interest in boating began as a young boy growing up on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay during WWII. His father bought an old eight-foot wooden sailboat that he and a friend rigged with a pole and an old bed sheet his mother gave them. After WWII, he moved to Indiana and continued boating and fishing on the numerous lakes. After serving in the Army from 1957 to 1960, he became an engineer with Sperry Gyroscope, and later worked at Grumman Aerospace on the Lunar Lander at the White Sands Apollo Test Site and the F-14 Tomcat at Point Mugu Naval Base. He also enjoys deep sea fishing and scuba diving. Patton requests that you support RBOC and keep abreast of what is happening in Sacramento and at the local level by visiting "www.rboc.org". -- Robert Piccioni, Rear Commodore