Sharron Came, President
Those of you sitting on the edge of your seats in anticipation of reading the annual report will have to wait a little longer. Perhaps you could sign up for a tramp to pass the time. The accounts are currently with the auditor and I expect to have the report ready to be signed off at our March Committee meeting. The report will go up on the website shortly thereafter.
If you are interested in being nominated for the 2013 Committee we are calling for nominations now. Just download a nomination form off the website or pick up a hard copy from the Club on a Wednesday night. We will have nomination forms available at the door. A few people have volunteered for roles already, this is great but we still have plenty of roles to fill. If you want to know who has been nominated for which role just check out the website. The AGM is scheduled for Wednesday 10 April. See you there.
Meantime check out the graphs below complied by our Statistics whiz Steve Kohler. If you lead trips you will know about Steve. He is the guy that sends out emails each week asking where your trip went, who went on it and what happened. At the end of the financial year he converts this data into graphs giving us a visual snapshot of trip activity that we can then compare with previous years. So what can we take away from these two graphs? WTMC runs a variety of trips. The bottom graph shows what proportion of people go on the different types of trip. The big story here is the number of people who go on the family trips, almost twice as many people as for any other trip type on a per trip basis. This can partly be explained by the tendency for an entire family to go on such trips rather than just an individual but the graphs indicate that family trips represent a big chunk of Club activity. Mike Gilbert has done a superb job of nurturing this aspect of Club life over the last few years.
Despite the variety of activities on offer we remain predominately a tramping club, the tramp, day walk and family categories combined make up the vast bulk of our activity with Alpine 1 trips, the next most popular category, lagging far behind. Tubing is back on the scene, this activity used to be popular then faded away for a bit and trail running shows up for the first time.
You can check out the rest of the graphs along with Amanda’s commentary in the annual report.
In this newsletter we are launching the revised Club policy for personal locator beacons. Thanks to everyone who assisted in the development of this policy particularly Amanda, Richard and Mike McGavin. Thanks also to Jenny Cossey who has shared her experiences with PLBs in this newsletter. While it is a good idea to take a PLB on a trip it’s the other stuff that is really important. Making sure you go on trips appropriate to your level of skill, experience and fitness, taking the appropriate equipment and food, checking the weather and track conditions, ensuring someone reliable knows where you are going and when you are coming back etc.
The revised Club Constitution has now been lodged with the Office of Incorporated Societies. You can find it on our website should you wish to refer to it. Speaking of the website, we are looking for people who have programming skills and experience with Drupal to help us with the various website improvements we are trying to implement. We have lots of members who work in IT some of you must have relevant skills and this would be a great way to help the Club run better. Contact Mike at for more details.
Our annual new member’s night was well attended by prospective members and a solid core of members showed up to help out. It was cool to have random members just popping along to show their support. This had nothing to do with all that amazing baking on offer. Big thanks to everyone, especially David and Sue who did the bulk of the organising on the night and the cake makers without whom our waist lines would be significantly smaller.
Last but my no means least, congratulations and best wishes to Jenny Beaumont and Steve Austin who as of Sunday 3 March 2013 are the proud parents of a baby boy!