Model yacht club hits water at Pacana Park

The desert seems an unlikely place for a yacht club, but that didn’t stop a group from the Province community from demonstrating their craft on Friday at Pacana Park Lake.

The Province Model Yacht Club held a remote control model boat sailing event to try and get Maricopans interested in the hobby with the hope to start a Maricopa Model Yacht Club.

The club is composed of officers Dennis McCormac, Dick Dabney, Dale Ehrbright, Harry Dieffenbach, James Raymond, Rich Hodgins and Robert Weinheimer. Started two years ago, the club is growing quickly.

“The enthusiasm at the club is unbelievable, we have a lot of people interested in where to buy the boats, how to get involved with the club, this type of thing,” said McCormac, the club’s commodore. “We are trying to get as many people as we can. We put the boats in the water and they like to sit and watch and it is very relaxing, calming, and it’s lot of fun. For the members, some of them have owned full-size sailboats and for others it’s a chance to sail.”

McCormac has owned three sailboats of different sizes in the past 35 years. He says these miniatures have all the same components of the real thing and respond similarly and “this is a pretty good way to have fun; you just can’t get on the boat.”

His wife, Barbara McCormac, is enthusiastic about the hobby and supportive of her husband. “It’s very relaxing for him. It gives him something to think about, something to do. He loves it and this is as close as he can get to a real sailboat.”

Ehrbright, the club’s vice-commodore, showed off a tug boat with two prongs designed to help sailboats when they get stuck.

“Because we use private lakes that belong to people’s property and sometimes the boats get stuck, I built a rescue boat,” he said. “It has a Province flag from the community and it’s completely different than a sailboat. When I started to build it, it was just a hull and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I put together my knowledge as a mechanical and electrical engineer and made it. It took me over six months to build.”

Several members of the club brought their boats, and the demonstration of sailing and model building drew the attention of everybody that was passing by the lake. Miho Ueno and her two children found the models interesting. “I’ve never seen that before, you look at the lake and it has a lot of boats. It’s cool, it’s really cool,” she said.

One yacht club member brought three historic replica boats. He said he spends around eight months just researching and planning, and depending on the complexity, it can take one to two years to construct a boat. He has almost 50 boats ranging from aircraft carriers to yachts with the history on each one.

The club’s next event will be a parade on the Fourth of July. “It will be a fun activity where everybody can sail. The members are available to teach and it doesn’t cost a dime,” Dennis McCormac said.

More information on the Province Model Yacht Club is available at their Web site.

Photos by Andréia Benite Cox