Claims against Sailing Clubs

Calm down everyone... There are some quite ridiculously apocalyptic hypotheses coming out here. Lets just see what happens before we run around screaming that the sky is falling.

 The sky may not be about to fall in but there are some fundamental principles at risk here which would be well worth fighting for. This club (which has done very little wrong) is being threatened with potentially ruinous legal action by a professional legal hard man unless it caves in and pays for this wretched man's dagger boards.  Suing a volunteer organisation in this way is undoubtedly a breach of good sportsmanship and good manners towards the host club and could and should be pursued under RRS69.  There are  many occasions when a race committee could be blamed for things that ought to have been avoided by the competitors - at many events the starting line is biased in favour of the pin end and you get crashes as the chancers come barrelling in on port.  Sometimes it is only just possible to cross the line on starboard and someone tacks at the pin and gets speared. If there is damage in this sort of situation, is everyone going to let their own insurance companies off the hook and sue the host club? It is already a fact of life that no yacht club meeting will last for more than three minutes before someone starts twittering about insurance, child protection, criminal record checks and so on. I have always told my volunteers to stop being so wimpish and take a few of life's uncertainties on risk. But we sail in a tidal bay which is often not really deep enough for the first race of the day. It seems the RO is now responsible for every dagger board and rudder on the water (our club is not a limited company so the RO would be sued in person.  I am usually the mark layer and course setter for Findhorn Week - well, I won't be this year. You see where this is leading?

Originally posted by andybury Who needs the hassle?

Would it be useful to raise this again with the RYA, people need to know where they stand?

I suspect there are grey areas.
(there are a lot of brown areas where I sail!)
For instance in my club, the water is tidal and shallow, and we have come close to having issues when courses and timings are altered from what has proven to work well over the last 50-odd years.
This seems most likely to happen when it's some kind of big event for the club rather than a common or garden club race.
Equally, people turn up with boats which differ from what's been the norm for the last 'n' years.

Sometimes, when a lifting rudder gets knocked up, you are not just worrying about the rudder, but what you might hit when you go out of control.
I've probably sailed over 400 races in that water and I'm still sometimes surprised by the shallow bits.
Some sailors seem remarkably oblivious to the idea that they, or the boat they are too close to, might run aground at any moment.

Originally posted by alstorer There's also no actual evidence that it was definitely F18s- I can't find a record of an event last year with the numbers described and the competitor scoreline described.

F18 Nats at Minnis?