By Mike Ferring
Rules Change Bottom Line
Dave Dellenbaugh offered the bottom line as he opened an online rules seminar I attended in November and December: when we go racing under the revised Racing Rules of Sailing 2025-2028, “We wouldn’t notice any difference in the way people are sailing.”
So, feel free to stop reading and go racing!
If You’re Still Reading
The new rules take effect January 1, a new revision that happens every four years for clarity or to address issues nobody foresaw when they wrote the last rules. Despite the many changes, the basic game of sailboat racing has changed little over the last three decades.
You can find key documents for the new rules online at World Sailing: World Sailing RRS 2025-2028. Click on that link to find the new rules and a marked-up study guide showing what they changed. In fact, two important rules were changed on an emergency basis in November when rules writers discovered unanticipated problems. Because of that, as I write this in early December, US Sailing has not issued a new rules book. They expect the mobile app to be ready around the first of 2025 and the printed books by February.
The Major Changes
Rule 14. This is the most important rule in the book! In short, it says, “Don’t hit another boat!” Good rule, right? For 2025, the rule has been broadened a bit to say you shouldn’t “cause” contact with another boat or force another boat to hit something.
For example, you’d break Rule 14 if you forced a barging boat up into the committee boat, even if you didn’t hit the barging boat. (However, you would likely be exonerated if the other boat had broken a rule of part two.)
Obstruction. The definition of obstruction is cleaned up and adds some language to make sure boats avoiding an obstruction give competitors an opportunity to change course.
If you race at Tempe Town Lake, make sure you read this section closely since those walls are definitely an obstruction or a continuing obstruction.
If you want to ask a competitor to give you room at an obstruction, it’s now clear that you need to use the hail, “Room to tack,” and the response needs to be a tack or a hail that says, “You tack.”
Mark Room. This is the famous Rule 18, the most complicated and difficult rule in the entire rulebook. There are a lot of wording changes that attempt to make the rule easier to understand, but not much true difference on the water.
If there’s not an overlap at the zone, now the right-of-way at the rounding goes to the first boat into the zone. (That’s a fine point since you thought it was that way already, didn’t you?) There are some unusual situations when this change clicks in.
The definition of mark room is slightly reworded for the better. And now it’s clearer when a boat has passed the mark: it’s when the mark is astern.
Protest. In addition to the current ways of protesting another boat, you can now protest a boat that’s out of range of a hail just by notifying them “at the first reasonable opportunity.”
For example, this might happen if you see a boat out of hailing range hit a mark and then not take its required one-turn penalty.
That’s it
Those are the changes that will most affect us on the racecourse. As you can see, there’s nothing that will shake up the game. In fact, if you’re new to the sport, I think the new rules will be slightly easier to understand.
Rules expert Dave Perry will be AYC’s guest speaker by Zoom at the January 14 monthly meeting. Click here to read the meeting post.
At the meeting, you’ll have the opportunity to probe the changes with a person who helped write the rule book and who wrote the definitive work on Understanding the Racing Rules of Sailing, his excellent explanation of the nooks and crannies of the RRS. Come with questions.