Advertising via sail numbers? 55

Originally posted by fudheid Originally posted by maxibuddah The whole point of rules is that they are adhered to. If you don't like them get them changed. Don't break them and then try to mitigate the situation by saying that you only broke it a little bit and it doesn't matter because it didn't give you an advantage. In the case of the furball as Dan said there was no real advantage and it's not a new technology so why get your knickers in a twist. The principle in this is that if the rules say you can't do it, you can't do it. End of story. Change the class rules before you take part in an event where the si's say you have to adhere to class rules.

+1

Originally posted by sandgrounder ...unless it was a deliberate effort to make the numbers difficult to read such that the sailor may escape an OCS call. Do you mean by reducing the number of digits?

Well several ways spring to mind. Moving the sail numbers down the sail and behind a genoa would be one particularly glaring method.

Unfortunately for our man, in the case of a Laser where the last, what is it, 4 digits are supposed to be of a contrasting colour to make them easier to read, making the colours less contrasting would increase the difficulty of reading numbers in a stressed OCS situation, which is doubtless why the Lasers have the rule.

Sadly we live in a world where there are people who would say, "Oh, but the shop didn't have any red numbers" when that wasn't in fact the case, so the innocent end up suffering alongside the guilty.

Edited by JimC - 12 Feb 13 at 3:58pm

Originally posted by tgruitt Originally posted by 2547 With regards to new and illegal sail construction methods used by sponsored sailors in an attempt no doubt to achieve a speed advantage I can see plenty of people being unhappy about that. That's the thing though, it's not like Tape Drive is even new, it's been around for ages and ages!!!

How do we know if the sail is even the same size as a standard one? There will be no measurement certificate to validate this. The same applies to replica sails for other boats, how do we know they are the same sail area as there is no independent quality control that a class measurer will give?

Originally posted by 2547 With regards to new and illegal sail construction methods used by sponsored sailors in an attempt no doubt to achieve a speed advantage I can see plenty of people being unhappy about that.

That's the thing though, it's not like Tape Drive is even new, it's been around for ages and ages!!!