Planet CakePHP

I'm creating a contact form to send an email to a specified address. I'm trying to utilize CakePHP model validations and since I don't need a table for the contact model, I've set useTable to false in the contact model.
Yet I'm getting an error in the controller function that does the sending. The error is

Missing Database Table
Error: Database table contacts for model Contact was not found.

pointing to the line that makes the first call to $this->Contact:

$this->Contact->validates( $this->data );

I thought this was all good to go with the CakePHP framework. Why am I wrong?