Erie Yacht Club finishing $800K community boathouse

May 15--The lessons Mark Rickloff learned as a boy at the Erie Yacht Club went beyond how to handle a sailboat.

As a young student at the club's Reyburn Sailing School, Rickloff gained insights -- about self-confidence, teamwork, perseverance -- that helped him as an adult.

"Except for very limited cases, sailing is not a one-person sport," said Rickloff, 62, a retired assistant vice president for financial services at Erie Insurance Group.

"It is a life lesson, really -- getting along with new people, trying to master a somewhat difficult thing," he said. "Being on a boat all summer is a good way to do it."

With major support from Rickloff and his family, the Erie Yacht Club and its nonprofit foundation are working to ensure that other children can share Rickloff's experiences well into the future, whether or not they belong to the 1,400-member private club.

The Erie Yacht Club Foundation is nearly ready to open the new home for the Reyburn Sailing School -- the 3,400-square-foot Rickloff Community Boathouse, which for months has been going up on the western edge of the Erie Yacht Club's property on Presque Isle Bay. The dedication and opening are set for mid-July.

The Rickloff family contributed $500,000 to the boathouse campaign, whose goal is $1.25 million, with $1.1 million raised to date, according to the Erie Yacht Club Foundation.

The boathouse will cost about $800,000 and will give the Reyburn Sailing School, now housed in a 264-square-foot shedlike building, room to expand, club officials said.

They said the foundation will use the rest of the money to support maritime-related charitable programs, including scholarships to allow more students, including those who are underprivileged, to participate in the Reyburn Sailing School.

The late Erie Yacht Club members Nathaniel and Myra Reyburn started the school in 1950, and it averages 140 students a year, including 20 adults, said Mike Lynch, the Erie Yacht Club's general manager. The students learn on sailing dinghies, including what are known as 420s, whose length is 4.2 meters, or about 14 feet.

The Yacht Club and the foundation will also allow community groups to use the boathouse for events that pertain to sailing and other maritime activities, club officials said. One of the first outside tenants is expected to be the new Gannon University sailing team.

"It is a legacy for the community," said Jim McBrier, chairman of the Erie Yacht Club Foundation. "Erie has a history of this. It is going to be here for generations to learn how to sail. It is all marine related."

The Erie Yacht Club Foundation was founded in 2009 to support charitable ventures to promote maritime activities in Erie, including at the 119-year-old Erie Yacht Club.

The foundation is leasing land for the building for $1 a year for 50 years from the Yacht Club, which will maintain the boathouse, McBrier said. The foundation broke ground on the project in September, and framing of the boathouse started in March. The building's dedication was originally scheduled for late May, but the harsh winter slowed construction.

The pace has quickened over the past several weeks. Contractors recently installed the blue steel roof and continue working on the interior. It features an open-beam trussed ceiling made of red and white oak -- the beams were assembled with pegs and mallets, with no nails, so they can be exposed -- and maple paneling, also exposed.

"Everyone is going to love it," Rickloff said. "The only criticism I have heard is that it blocks the sunset. My reaction is, take seven steps to the right. It is a great project."

The one-floor boathouse, erected on a concrete pier, is elevated on 35 steel pipes because the Yacht Club is in a flood plain. The boathouse-on-stilts look adds to the building's maritime character. So do the banks of high bay skylights on the north face, which flood the interior with natural light. The boathouse, which is unheated, will be open from April to October.

"We wanted it to feel like a rustic boathouse, like the old ones that got built in Boston or anywhere in New England," said the architect, Ross Rectenwald, of Bostwick Design Partnership, and a director at the Yacht Club.

The boathouse includes a classroom, areas for the repair of sails and small equipment for the sailing school's dinghies, as well as restrooms and an office. The Erie Yacht Club Foundation plans to add solar panels and incorporate lessons about alternative energy into the curriculum of the Reyburn Sailing School.

"We expect this building to be here 150 years from now," said the project's general contractor, David J. Haller, who donated his time supervising the boathouse's construction.

Haller also oversees the Yacht Club's grounds and buildings as its fleet captain. Eighteen years ago, he built the small building that is the current home of the Reyburn Sailing School, which he said the school will continue to use. Haller's voice rose in excitement recently as he talked about the Rickloff Community Boathouse taking shape several yards away.

"This is the real deal," Haller said as he pointed out the exposed beams in the new boathouse. "This is timber."

Mark Rickloff, who spends winters in Florida, returned last week to Erie, the new boathouse and the Reyburn Sailing School, where he started as a student when he was 11. His connections to the Erie Yacht Club and sailing have deepened since then.

Rickloff's siblings and children attended the Reyburn Sailing School. Rickloff worked as a sailmaker for seven years before he started his 20-year career at Erie Insurance in 1979 as an investment accountant. In 2011, he started the Rickloff Family Fund, which purchases sails for the boats at the Reyburn Sailing School.

With the new community boathouse, Rickloff is adding to his vision. He likes what he sees.

"It is gorgeous," he said.

ED PALATTELLA can be reached at 870-1813 or by e-mail. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNpalattella.

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