420 winged rudder

Some of the basic rules of sailing are straightforward: port/starboard, hitting a mark, some class rules. After that it all gets more open to interpretation and can get devilishly complicated couched in its own legalese.

It can be difficult enough sometimes shuffling plastic boats around (as the rules posts on this forum attest), let alone trying to interpret stuff in a crowd of boats and/or spray.

I wonder how many of us would be confident in our knowledge of the rules to act as an on the water umpire even at club level? I for one would not.

I'm not sure what the the answer is to self-policing (is there one?) but somewhere a means to educate beyond the basic rules must come in there - and that could include a simplification of some the rules. It would be interesting to get the views of some of the rules Gurus on here (Gordon, Brass etc) of the current state of fitness for purpose of our rules.

A start, I believe,  would be for the RYA to easier through some grass roots funding to enable clubs to have their own rules "champions". It is the rules that define how we play our sport so they should be seen as important at club level.

I'm not advocating more protests, I'm advocating more education.

you will not may see winged rudders in the future because, but you did not see them in the first place at the BM!

Originally posted by iGRF It was a bunch of dinghy types that ruined our (windsurfings) 1st attempt at a cheap production class, Division 1 as it was then called the idea being to stabilise around flat boards a mast limited to 460 and 6.0mtr sails, so what happened a couple of mothies showed up with high roach sails and cleaned up. Technically they didn't break the rules ( a loose 2/3rds base times height triangulation was being used to measure the sails and lighter boards had to carry weight) the class died.

Oh come on. Division 1 died because everyone started sailing funboards and flat boards were instantly old hat.

Not quite, Division 1 eventually was regained to become the 'raceboard' class and as Mike said earlier, there followed a Golden Period where one could turn up, one board one rig, (it was 7.5) what happened next, that same bunch (local sailmakers eager to create a local direct market) drove the unlimited class, so 10sq mtr Demon and Reflex if you happened to be around the Grafham area appeared and rigs up to 12 sq mtrs appeared.

But it was this dinghy style direct marketing that did for us (the racing types)in the end, all the time the market was structured and the sales were put through dealers, ( the Div 1 production class, and then Raceboard being largely on production stuff) with controlled pricing and margins it worked OK and folk external to the scene continued to promote the idea of racing.

But once racing just turned inwards and like the dinghy industry, just fed upon itself, boards were sold direct to each other, sails were built and some got direct deals and others didn't so new folk felt instantly prejudiced against so turned away and frankly the planing side of the sport was always more attractive and more easily marketed.

My world was pushing One design, kind of SMOD style you call it except we did keep things alive by changing the set up periodically until we fell into the arms of ISAF and became Olympic, and instead of the customary after party squads of orange juice drinking youfs were shepherded off home and then off to obscurity, you can't sell that to anyone and so that died away.