Blood on the carpet

Peter Bentley looks forward to this weeks ISAF Annual Meeting

Not much will have changed since this picture was taken in 1994

This week more than 400 people will spend several days cooped up in an hotel in Lisbon, Portugal making a huge number of supposedly momentous decisions about the future of sailing. So what's on the agenda? How to get more young sailors on the water? Making the sport more media friendly? Ways to make sailing more attractive to big corporate sponsors? Err well, no, not quite. This is the ISAF Annual general meeting.

Most of what is up for discussion is very mundane stuff detailing the exact terms of reference for the individual committees, who is elected onto those committees and so on. Some of it is just plain boring. The Racing Rules Committee is one of the worst offenders here with numerous small changes to tiny and almost forgotten sections of the rulebook. Why do they do it, you may ask? Because they can.

Even the supposedly huge decisions could be made in not much more than a day by the board of directors of any medium sized company, so what's all the fuss about? In a word, democracy. Everybody wants to have their say and by and large they will. While the proceedings may be drawn out, the sailors of the world need not lie awake at night worrying what the outcome will be. But for a very select few directly affected by individual decisions, not much is going to change. Port will still give way to Starboard and the Windward boat will have to keep clear of the Leeward boat (except of course if rules 13, 16, 20 or 21 apply - yawn, oh sorry).

The one single issue that will probably have the biggest impact on grass roots sailors world wide in the long term revolves around the so-called ORC. Those initials used to stand for Offshore Racing Council, a quasi-independent body charged with administering the development and application of offshore racing rules around the world. At last November's ISAF meetings the ORC became the Offshore Racing Committee, in effect a wholly owned subsidiary of the ISAF and as such directly answerable to the ISAF Executive and General Assembly.

The problem is that some people, ISAF President Paul Henderson amongst them, don't like the answers they are getting. To the surprise of no one, the ORC has remained exactly what it has always been, a single focus user group administering the IMS Rule. While IMS may have died a death in the UK and the USA it is still popular in much of Europe, especially in the Mediterranean and the Baltic. No one doubts that the IMS does what it does very well. What it does not do is represent the broad cross section of handicap racing that is going on around the world. Still less does it represent the vast majority of sailors who are enjoying racing in boats with beds where everyone can understand the results; one-designs.

Led by the Paul Henderson, the ISAF executive are now proposing that the existing ORC should in become in name what it has always been since the demise of the old International Offshore Rule (IOR), the IMS class association. A new and more representative ORC will then be established to represent the combined interests of all offshore sailors.

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