Canadian Yachting - April 2011

www.google.com and Hotmail www.hotmail.com are popular. Once such an email address is set up, that member should log in to the Member Site as a first-time visitor and complete the profile information. As well, the Squadron/District Administration Officer should edit the Bridge list accordingly.

Extend your reach – be social

If you ask a younger person today how they communicate with their peers, it’s likely they will refer to the revolution in communication known as “social media”. By this, they mean Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube – to mention just a few. In fact, if you ask parents how they communicate with their kids, they will tell you the same thing.

CPS has embraced social media, thanks to the efforts of Vanessa Schmidt, our staff Graphic Designer & Marketing Coordinator. Links to the three services mentioned are present on our web sites in the form of very small icons. Click on any one, and you will discover that Vanessa is extremely active in promoting CPS activities, courses and Squadrons on a daily basis.

Quite a number of Squadrons have already adopted social media and are reaching out to new audiences. All Squadrons can take immediate advantage of these free services by setting up a group and regularly posting news of their activities. An idea: assign this task to someone graduating from the Boating (or Boat Pro) courses and bring new blood and new ideas onto your Bridge.

Port Hole Editor-in-Chief wins Volunteer of the Year CASBA Award

Joan Eyolfson Cadham, our dear volunteer Editor-in-Chief of The Port Hole has recently won, in Toronto, the prestigious CASBA Award as Volunteer of the Year.

Joan is a Life Member of CPS and has been the volunteer Editor-
in-Chief for the last 13 years. She always makes sure that every edi-
tion of The Port Hole contains at least one boating safety article and
that other articles allude to safety. Joan is very mindful of the fact
that the CPS magazine is prominently featured in the centre of
Canadian Yachting magazine and is available to CPS members and
non-members, and is on newsstands across Canada ( 30,000-plus
distributed copies per issue). Her self-stated intentions are for read-
ers to learn about boating safety without being “hit over the head
with it.”
A boat and a man named Jack Cadham (Joan’s husband) is why
Joan started writing. Jack owned a wonderful old wooden sailboat
called the Hirondelle. Joan was working with emotionally disturbed
kids, a fairly stressful job. After work she would head down to the
wharf to sand, varnish and putter around on the boat. She took to
carrying a notebook with her. In it she would record observations,
bits of poetry, play with images. She wrote an article about the
Rideau Canal, which Jack and she often cruised, that was focussed
on wandering around cozy little anchorages, old cemeteries and
churches. To her surprise, Canadian Yachting took the story. Soon
after, other yachting magazines began buying her cruise guides and
for the next few years she couldn’t write them fast enough. She
became an award-winning columnist writing for many boating
magazines and CBC radio.

“Success is knowing I’ve touched people. It’s being able to say what I want to say and having a public forum. Most of all it’s being satisfied with what I write. I’ve worked hard at it, edited it carefully and some days, it comes out right.”

Congratulations to our Port Hole, Editor-in-Chief, Joan Eyolfson Cadham for winning the Canadian Safe Boating Council's Award for Top Volunteer Dedicated to Safe Boating. The Awards were presented Jan. 9 by the CSBC and Ted Rankine.

She began writing articles for CPS in 1987 and joined the editorial committee of The Port Hole in 1995. Since then, she dedicates her volunteer time and professional writing skills to boating and boating safety. Despite being diagnosed with Ideopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, which means that she has had to be on oxygen continually, Joan is still as enthusiastic and passionate about her volunteer work as she has always been.