Video Library Player:  A Yacht Club for the Common Man
The College Point Yacht Club welcomes blue-collar members, as long as they're willing to work in the boat yard.
Very interesting accompanying article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/nyregion/14ritual.html?_r=1 --- mostly pasted below

AS the commodore at the College Point Yacht Club, Tony Tondo holds a lofty title, suggesting a man in a blazer dining with moneyed members in an oak-paneled room. Instead, Mr. Tondo can usually be found in the club’s gritty boatyard, wearing jeans and construction boots and operating a forklift.

The club, which lies near the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge and next door to a sewage treatment plant, is a world removed from exclusive yacht clubs in suburban seashore towns where expensive vessels with designer furniture bob in the water. At the College Point club, in Queens, some of the boats floating in the water are held together with the help of half a hardware store.

Commodores at more upscale clubs oversee regattas and sailing schools and leave the hard work of preparing boats for a season on the water to the hired help, but there is no hired help at Mr. Tondo’s club. So it falls to the commodore himself to field a flood of calls from impatient members clamoring for their boats to be taken out of winter storage and lowered off the club’s bulkhead into the East River’s murky waters.

This time of year, Mr. Tondo is busy commanding a fleet of tractors, boat trailers and hydraulic boat lifts.

“We’re what you call a working man’s yacht club,” said Mr. Tondo, 60, a retired auto parts dealer, as he stood at the controls of a huge boat lift the other day. He looked at his watch and barked at several other members helping him prepare the next boat to be launched.

“Once the tide drops, we can’t put these boats in anymore — not deep enough,” he said.

The yacht club lies behind an unmarked entrance off Powell’s Cove Boulevard at the northern end of 126th Street near La Guardia Airport and the city’s jail complex on Rikers Island. The club’s neighbor to the west is an unsightly expanse of craggy piers. To the east is the Tallman Island sewage plant; members live with the smell.

The clubhouse is an old barge that was run aground years ago. At the end of a gravel and asphalt yard is a tiki bar and a grill made from half an oil drum. The floating docks jutting out into the river provide 112 boat slips.

There are no fancy regattas, tennis courts or swimming pools. The club, which 12 men started in 1950 by erecting a shack, is more blue-collar than blue blazer.

Many of the 88 members are retired civil servants and tradesmen who fix up used motorboats and spend weekends chasing bluefish and drinking Budweiser. The bar is open to the public, but is usually filled with raucous members comparing pensions and overtime pay and making fall hunting dates. The bathroom is distinguished by a urinal bearing a decal of Osama bin Laden — for target practice. A retired police officer is the bartender, and retired firefighters work in the kitchen.

The fees are in keeping with the club’s unassuming profile. Members, who are expected to help maintain the club and work at events, pay $950 in annual dues for the first two years. After that, the annual dues drop to $350. Slip fees, based on a boat’s length, are $42 a foot.

“Keeping a 30-foot boat here might cost you about $1,200 for the season, all told,” said Larry Samuelson, 55, of Flushing, Queens, a truck mechanic and a 20-year member whose grandfather, Fred Fuchs, was the club’s first commodore. “You’re not going to find that anywhere else.”

As the club’s current commodore, Mr. Tondo sometimes does put on a crisp white officer’s uniform to do the fancy yacht club thing. He did so recently for the club’s season-opening flag-raising ceremony, complete with a toy cannon, a bugler and bagpiper.

The members built the place themselves, using castoff material including asphalt from a resurfacing of the Long Island Expressway and concrete ripped from Queens Boulevard. A patio was built with the help of a member who drives a cement truck and delivered leftover cement.

“You have a lot of guys here who are carpenters, electricians — we’re all pretty handy — so everyone pitches in,” said Artie McCrossen, a retired New York City firefighter.

Kim Cody, 57, a 15-year-member, has been spending the days priming his powerboat, named Dance With Me.

“Nobody’s nose is up in the air or anything like that,” said Mr. Cody, a retired detective from Queens. “We’re not afraid to get our hands dirty — that’s the best part about it.”

There are about a half-dozen boating clubs around Flushing Bay, a location that provides easy access to Long Island’s North Shore, City Island and Westchester County.

The College Point marina blends well with the neighborhood’s working-class character. One member, Bob Hanft of Middle Village, Queens, a shift supervisor for Con Edison, said he has never gotten used to the term yacht club, which he considers ostentatious and imprecise. He will not wear the club’s shirt around his neighborhood.

“I’m a working-class kid from Queens — I just can’t say ‘yacht club,’ you know what I mean? I can’t bring myself to say it,” said Mr. Hanft, a four-year member.

Steve Brimbert began renting a slip at the club this spring as an inexpensive way to continue boating during tough economic times.

“I had no idea a club like this existed,” said Mr. Brimbert, who works in the garment industry and used to rent a slip at a more expensive marina on Long Island. “It’s not like some of these snooty clubs where the members have their million-dollar boats. It’s not pretentious, and it’s one of the few clubs that allow you to work on your own boat, instead of having to hire their own expensive mechanic.”

Like a skilled restaurant valet, Mr. Tondo has developed a system to use every available space to squeeze the boats on the club’s tiny lot. “That’s why they keep me around here,” he joked, while sliding a trailer under a 28-foot Rinker powerboat. “I’m the only one who can get the boats back out, in the spring.”

He towed the Rinker toward the water past a decommissioned New York New York Police Department patrol vessel and a powerboat named Bite Me Twice. The powerboat safely eased into the water, Mr. Tondo went to fetch another.