RYA Racing Classes Forum 2000

Dear All, this is my take on the event. Hopefully a more official report will appear on the RYA website in due course.

I'm glad I went to this, there was a lot of stuff the class needs to be aware of, and because we are well off main stream I probably doesn't do any harm for our voice to be heard. The report will get a bit fragmented towards the end, where much of the stuff that really affects us came, because it had been a long and tiring day and I had a splitting headache. Sorry!

The ISAF Advertising Code.

This has generated a lot of heat. Basically its as I've reported before, I don't seem to have made any major misunderstandings. The Cherub Class goes Cat A on 1st of Jan unless we get our fingers out. I've yet to hear that anyone's worried! The idea behind the rule change is apparently to encourage small time sponsorship for small time sailors - the example they used was so that a 16 year old can get some dosh from his boss for new rags in exchange for some graphics on them (not quite expressed like that!).
Rule Breaches will be adjudicated on by protest committees. Their jurisdiction is limited though - they CANNOT DSQ you for an advertising code breach!
We can limit Class C if we wish, but we must have ISAF, yes ISAF, not RYA approval for the changes. The RYA have a "template" of possible wordings and they are reasonably confident that restrictions using those suggestions will be approved.
There are NO restrictions for ads on your clothes. That's because no-ones ever been able to legislate for the difference between a logo and an advertisement...
Events and Clubs may go "Wimbledon White" - e.g. ban all advertising. The steer from the RYA is that if a club want to ban then they'll let them, but... They won't be able to go Cat A for a series that is multi-club, e.g. a Travellers' trophy event, and it must be in the Notice of Race and Sailing Instructions.
And finally there is NO right for a club or Class Association to require competitors to have event sponsors ads on sails. The 18s are, to say the least, not happy about this! Apparently it was an argument the RYA lost.
The general theme is that in general the Class Association - e.g. all the Sailors - are the only ones who have the right to tell you whether you can have ads on your boat or not, and no-one can tell you what ads to put on.

Care and Feeding of Volunteers.

In general I felt this was of limited interest to the Cherub Class, but of immense interest to Clubs. One quick statistic though - for every pound available to UK sport from sponsorship (including Lottery Money) £5 is saved by the use of unpaid volunteers, who were reckoned to be worth £1.5 Billion to UK Sport in 1996. However if you're involved in running your home club then you should certainly find out about the assistance you can get in making good use of your Volunteer labour from the Sports Council.
However there is one thing that the Cherub Class should do, I think, and that is to have a regular list in the magazine of all the things that could usefully be done and seeking people who'd be prepared to do them.

We then got, as light relief, a neat video of some Americas Cup action, lunch (which we had to pay for :-( ) and then some stuff about the Olympics squad.

Rule Observance, Protest Committees and Juries

The big news is that protest flags are out for boats under 6m. In future a hail of "Protest" is enough for a jury to hear the protest. They can't chuck it out if there's no flag.
I was expecting this to be mindlessly boring... However Bryan Willis, who is probably the UK and Worlds top sailing rules judge, is a b****y good speaker. He practically made you want to just get out there and protest someone! Seriously though a lot of his talk was about how organisers can minimise protests, and then about when you should and shouldn't have Rule 60 protests (serious breaches of good sportsmanship). I also suspect that some of the practices he uses would horrify a lawyer. He has, for instance, a list of top sailors that he considers are prone to telling porkies in hearings, and if there's any doubt about the facts their version gets ignored! The whole approach was actually very practical and pragmatic and (much to my surprise) not legalistic...

Class Membership and Measurement Certification Compliance.

You guys are going to go apes**t when you read about this one. I'll leave it to last!

Equipment Rules of Sailing

This is the biggy, and unfortunately coincided with my headache. Sorry. I shall get more information when I have it. Basically the ISAF are suggesting - not compelling, but suggesting - that everyone rewrites their rules to a standard format. Yes, I can hear you all shouting "F*** off, what's it got to do with them". Well nothing of course, but there may be some advantage, and one of them could be one of Andy Paterson's long held ambitions!
Firstly the rules we are using for sail measurement are way out of date. Ken Kershaw, the techie bloke in that area at the RYA was fairly horrified to find we were still using them, and listed a whole lot of problems with them. However all the problems were with things like the way they define seams and patches and all the things we don't care about, and nothing to do with the actual area measurement which was the only bit that was any good! However if we update the rules to use the latest version then there are a couple of advantages.
The first is that the RYA are training up a whole bunch of people to be official measurers using the standard rules. If we use the standard rules then those people become official Cherub sail measurers. Loads of them, all round the Country. No excuse for not getting those rags measured now Lads!
The second advantage (Graham Caws will want to read about this - Dick Batt already knows, he was chairing the meeting) is that it will be possible for sailmakers to measure and certificate sails that they made, so that your sails come ready measured. There will be a degree of bureaucracy about this (ISO9000 and all that c*** I think), but it obviously makes life much easier for the sailmaker if they know the damn things are OK before they go out. And for all of those who think "well, that's a stupid idea, they'll pass anything", a sailmaker caught doing that, by event measuring for instance, will be in very deep s*** and have a lot of time trouble and expense before they can get their certificate back. This may sound odd, until you consider that in just about any other sport the equipment comes pre-measured and guaranteed by the manufacturer (when did you last take your new table tennis balls to the local Table tennis measurer!).
OK that's the sail rules. What about the rest? There are a number of bit to this, the main lot being a whole lot of definitions of what things are and how to measure them, plus a whole list of what order things should be and so on. Given that you just pick out the actual measurements you want, and everything else is defined in the rules. Although there's not an awful lot of explanation in our rules, with any luck this might enable us to shorten the actual Class rules even more, maybe down to Andy Paterson's ambition of one sheet of A4 paper!
Another potential advantage is that if we use all the ISAF definitions and so on the actual knowledge of our rules and how we interpret them reduces considerably, and again maybe we can get to the situation where a Cherub could be measured by any ISAF approved measurer.
Right now I think we ought to get hold of a copy of all this stuff, read and digest it, and then consider as a class whether there are advantages for us in transforming the rules to the official format. There' s no hurry - at the moment there is no intention to force this on anyone other than new International Classes, although existing National and International Classes are being encouraged to adopt the new format with a target of 2006 for adoption. If you take a look at the last set (1987/2000) of Equipment Rules http://www.sailing.org/equipmentrules/, however, its not easy to see the application to our requirements, and I know that the 14s aren't currently planning to move away from their current rules.

4) Class Membership and Measurement Certification Compliance.

Now folks. Sit down. Grab a cup of coffee. Think calm thoughts. This isn't nearly as bad as it is going to seem the first time you read it (I don't think) and is in the exceedingly early stages of consultation. Its really no more than a kite flying exercise I think, and it's a RYA initiative, not an ISAF one. I also was in maximum bad headache mode for this one, and not able to concentrate as well as I would have liked.
Firstly the RYA is piloting a scheme with certain classes where the class lets the RYA have a database of current members/measurement certificates, and they then check entries in a small number of events, some major, some minor, against the database. If any boats show up that aren't listed then the RYA writes t the club and says - "so and so's boat isn't registered. You may do something about it if you like".
Secondly the RYA is considering whether it should offer a service for Class Associations for registering boats. Sort of like a DVLC for sailboats. Perhaps a system where, when you buy a new or s/h boat, you register it on line with the RYA, pay with a credit card, and then the Class Association gets a monthly cut from the RYA.
The logic behind it is that under rule 78 everyone is required to have a certificate. However it's one of those rules, like the one about pumping, which is virtually impossible to police by the conventional protest system. Thus logically one should either ditch the rule or think about another way to enforce it.
What they want to try and do is to get to a situation where getting your certificate is so easy and hassle free, and exactly the same for every class, so that there's no reason not to do it. Quite a tall order I reckon! Whether the Class would ever be happy about having the RYA involved in its administration, even to that extent, is another matter!

Jim Champ