Rule 42

Some classes have a long top batten and that can be a reet swine to get popped. The same classes suffer from a few who apparently always need 2 or 3 or more attempts - with vigourous rolling and wafting of sail / pumping of the boom. Significant forward propulsion results - clear breach of R42 but hard to prove unless most of fleet gangs up on them - but then everyones doing it - just to different degrees.

Problem area - beer is clearly best solution.

That wasn't me, and I wasn't there, however at that time I (in my Supernova) was nearly taken to protest at least twice for trying to pop the battens across. The CA forum had a bit of discussion about what constitutes pumping/popping back then. I too was lead to understand that one pump (soley to get the battens across) was acceptable.

I could be very wrong here, but I vaguely remember the Supernova CA saying that they would allow up to 2 pumps for this purpose.

I was particularly annoyed at the time when I was critisised for "pumping" as it was by a catamaran sailor... Cats seem to spend every tack pumping their mains to get their battens to pop (though the speed gain in such cases would be negligable anyway).

You are right Paul, it is all down to technique.  But if I have bad technique (And I obviously do), should I be penalised twice (Once for the bad tack/gybe and twice for the supposed pumping!)

Maybe I should be asking the RYA for clarification, so that it appears in the appeals folder, and we then have a definitive answer.

It does seem that rule 42 is rather woolly.  I always had an issue that you could pump a sail to initiate planing, so if you are crap at pumping and failed to initialise the plane, you could be protested!!!!

I obviously now found another flaw in that rule......

Do the RYA Rules Dept watch this forum? What is thier comment??.

Jon

Gordon, Have PM'ed you

Jon