CCA has selected John F. Towle (Falmouth, Mass.) to receive the Club’s Richard S. Nye Award for 2016, awarded for his meritorious service to the Cruising Club of America and the Boston Station over a period of twenty-four years. The award will be presented at the CCA’s annual Awards Dinner at the New York Yacht Club in New York on March 3, 2017. The Board of Governors established the award to recognize a member of CCA “who has brought distinction to the Club by meritorious service, outstanding seamanship, outstanding performance in long distance cruising or racing, statesmanship in the affairs of international racing, or any combination of the above.”
Towle has continuously participated in the activities of both CCA and the Club’s Boston station since he became a member in 1993. Towle has served as Co-Chair of the Saint John River Cruise in 2000 and was Chair of the Club’s Membership Committee from 2005 to 2010. Since 2013, Towle has been Co-Chair of CCA’s 100th Anniversary Committee, an important and sizeable job by any measure; one that will keep him busy until 2022. As the CCA’s historian since 2007, Towle has added new meaning to the importance of that office through his extraordinary undertaking of writing the history of CCA in a series of articles in the Club’s semi-annual publication, the Gam. Entitled “Tracing Our History”, the series began in 2010 and, so far, has covered the story of CCA from its founding in 1922 up to 1960. Again, there is more work ahead for him. After years of sailing in the northeast and racing to Bermuda and Halifax, Towle can now be found cruising his lovely Concordia Yawl, Sisyphus, farther east in the Canadian Maritimes.
