CCA’s Skidaway Island Banquet Hits All the High Notes

One of Skidaway Island’s signature events, our chapter’s 24th Annual Banquet and Auction brought together an exceptionally enthusiastic crowd of nearly 200 attendees, which led to a strong “buy in” on our raffle and silent auction and resulted in spirited bidding for the evening’s live auction line up.

“Preliminary results show we achieved our highest revenue in recent memory with net results of around $50,000, which seriously exceeds our $43,000 budget,” noted Banquet Chair Tom Rood. “We continue to note that quality, not quantity, is the key to our fund-raising success.”           

Guests were greeted with banners that featured this year’s dinner theme, a tribute to CCA’s early achievements using the distinctive black dotted redfish tail as the graphic element in our phrase, Our Tail of Success. Wine cozies with this striking logo were distributed at captain’s tables throughout the ballroom. Table decorations also featured painted wooden redfish tails; part of a youth art contest held prior to the banquet.           

Just before dinner, we presented a five-minute slide show on the origins of CCA, the development of Georgia CCA and our own chapter’s education and outreach efforts. “This presentation points to CCA’s successes but also underscores the importance of continuing conservation and education efforts,” Rood said. “It certainly helps get guests in the right frame of mind in terms of enthusiasm and support.”

Rood concluded that this year’s event was perhaps the best on record.

“A positive mood, enhanced by the presence of a contingent of U.S. Army Ranger guests helped spark what became one of our chapter’s most successful banquet and auction events on record.,” he said.