Claims against Sailing Clubs

Originally posted by clubmember     The competitor had chartered the boat specifically for the event. The competitor asked the owner of the boat to claim on his own insurance but this was refused. The claim has not come from his insurers but by a private ‘legal assistance’ firm. The RYA has been very non-committal and has been reluctant to provide anything of substance other than ‘let us know what happens’.

Yep, chartering and insurance is a minefield. For most of us ordinary folks the best advice is *never* charter your boat out. Best left to the big boat people where all the legal options and so on are well understood and there's enough money in the deal to get it all sorted out properly without the income all disappearing in the admin and overheads.
Lending my boat to friends for trips round the bay or races, with me watching, having rigged the boat and with weather and everything else carefully controlled: sure, I do it fairly frequently. Apart from anything else in those circumstances it would take a lot of effort to do something I can't fix. Charter? No way.

The chartering thing is interesting but not what the original post was about, which was whether you can sue a race officer or his club for something they do in the course of organising a race. This is hugely important. If an amateur volunteer race officer doing the job for the first time underestimates the incompetence of those on the water, is he or she liable in law? Suppose the Hamble River Sailing Club organises a race and a competitor is subsequently run down by a hovercraft, can they be sued? If the answer is yes, I for one will never do RO again. I think the RYA might pick this one up f asked.

George's points are the critical issue here ...

If the amateur race officer sets his start line smack across the hovercraft route or the deepwater channel, clear against all the guidance in his club race management instructions, then I reckon he or his club is vulnerable to being sued. Same as every time you venture out on the road in your car you're vulnerable to being sued if you do something negligent and stupid.

However if everything is set according to the club manual, and in clear breach of all the SIs, course notes and everything else, some idiot blunders across the hovercraft route and gets run down, then I'm quite sure the RO is 100% in the clear.

But I'm not a lawyer, I could be talking complete BS.