Episode #172: Rob Overton on the Racing Rules of Sailing (RRS)

Rob Overton is the Past Chairman of the Racing Rules Committee for US Sailing, a committee he’s served on for over 30 years. Tune in as Rob chats with Good Jibes host Moe Roddy about the new Racing Rules of Sailing (RRS) heading into 2025.

Rob has raced and cruised sailboats for over 65 years, including campaigning a 470 in the 1976 Olympic Trials. Hear what drew him to a career in math and sailing, his year cruising the world with his wife Andi and daughter Lisa, the history of the Racing Rules of Sailing, what to expect in the new Racing Rules of Sailing, and the most beautiful sight on the water.

 Here’s a sample of what you’ll hear in this episode: 

• How is sailing similar to geometry?
• What Rules Committee Hearings are like?
• What are Beetle Cats?
• Why do the Racing Rules of Sailing change every four years?
• What drew Rob so deep into sailing rules?
• Why do you get exonerated if you run your boat into the racing committee’s boat?

Check out the episode and show notes below for much more detail.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots — follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re feeling the Good Jibes!

Learn from Rob at the San Francisco Yacht Club and learn more about the Racing Rules of Sailing 2025-2028 from Max Ebb here: https://www.latitude38.com/issues/january-2025/#60

Show Notes

• Rob Overton on the Racing Rules of Sailing (RRS)
  • [0:21] Welcome to Good Jibes with Latitude 38
  • [1:09] Introducing Rob Overton
  • [2:08] Where did Rob grow up?
  • [3:33] Do you remember the first time you were ever on a boat? 
  • [4:29] Did Rob come up through a sailing program?
  • [5:57] What is a Barnegat Bay Sneakbox?
  • [7:03] What are Beetle Cats?
  • [9:46] How Rob took to sailing when he was first introduced to it?
  • [10:49] Was Rob good at math as a kid?
  • [14:29] Did Yale let Rob stay at their clubhouse?
  • [16:01] When did Rob find time to keep sailing and marry his lovely wife?
  • [19:16] Rob and Andi bought a 470 and raced it for 7 years
  • [22:10] When did they decide to go cruising?
  • [27:12] To find a copy of Latitude 38 near you, go to Latitude38.com
  • Racing Rules of Sailing
  • [27:37] How did Rob get into the Racing Rules of Sailing?
  • [29:58] Does anybody know what’s wrong with the rules and how we could change them?
  • [30:55] How Rob discovered he was a member of the Rules Committee
  • [36:28] Rob is the chairman of the Team Racing Rules Working Party
  • [39:05] Updating Rule 18
  • [43:25] Do you get exonerated if you are forced to run your boat into the race committee boat?
  • [45:23] Rules about protest, redress, hearings, and misconduct
  • [51:27] Why do the rules change every 4 years?
  • [52:48] Looking to sail more? Join the crew list at Latitude38.com
  • Short Tacks
  • [53:43] What’s Rob’s favorite book about sailing?
  • [54:26] Rob’s favorite non-sailing book?
  • [55:39] What was your favorite trip you’ve ever taken?
  • [56:38] If you could have beer with anyone, alive or dead, who would that be? And why?
  • [58:35] What’s the most important lesson that you’ve learned over your professional career?
  • [1:00:04] What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from sailing?
  • [1:00:53] Who’s inspired you most in your life?
  • [1:01:03] Where is your favorite place in the world to sail?
  • [1:02:18] What drew Rob to the rules so much?
  • [1:05:00] Rob’s pitch for you to fall in love with sailing rules
  • [1:06:10] Check out the Latitude 38 Bookstore here for books recommended by Good Jibes guests
  • [1:06:26] Round tables at the San Francisco Yacht Club
  • [1:08:49] Make sure to follow Good Jibes with Latitude 38 on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
  • Check out the January 2025 issue of Latitude 38
  • Theme Song: “Pineapple Dream” by Solxi.

Transcript:  

Please note: transcript not 100% accurate.

_

00:03

There’s nothing in the world like dawn at sea.

 

00:22

Ahoy, it’s time to cast off, laugh, learn, and have more fun sailing. My name is Moe Roddy and I am the host of today’s episode of Good Jibes, a podcast to help you experience the world of sailing through the eyes of the West Coast sailor. Each week, hear stories and tips from the West Coast sailing community about cruising, racing, and just sailing. Brought to you by Latitude 38.

 

00:49

the sailing magazine for West Coast sailors since 1977. Make sure you visit our website and subscribe to Good Jibes to enjoy our weekly podcasts. You won’t be sorry. I’ll remind you again at the end of this podcast today and share with you a link to subscribe.

 

01:09

My guest today is an accomplished sailor, both as a racer and a cruiser. He has cruised along with his wife, Andy, over half of the planet. In addition to his cruising and racing, he has found the time to serve on the US Sailing Racing Rules Committee from 1993 to present, and as chairman of that committee from 2009 to 2021, and continues to serve even today. But wait, I’m not done.

 

01:39

There’s more. Along the way, he also carved out time in academics, earning a doctorate of philosophy in mathematics and topography. Now tell us more about that. And together with his wife, raised a daughter. Please welcome to the Good Jibes podcast, Rob Overton. Welcome, Rob. Thank you, Moe. Good to see you. Nice to see you too. Well, people are gonna hear us. They can’t see us, but. So I always like to start at the beginning, Rob. I do this for everyone.

 

02:08

So tell us where you were born and where you grew up. I was born on Long Island, New York, and grew up on the South shore of Long Island, a little town called Belport, about a thousand residents, something like that. And where sailing is basically the sport, other than maybe little league baseball, something like that. It’s the conditions there are just fantastic. Every afternoon in the summertime, the wind comes up at one o’clock in the afternoon and blows.

 

02:37

15 knots steadily until it dies in the evening. And so it’s perfect sailing conditions. Was it a bit of a tourist town too in the summer? Did a lot of people from this city come in? No, it’s an enclave for incredibly rich people. Oh. There were us, the poor residents, and then there were the others, whom we call, we call them Yorkers. Yorkers. Yorkers, because they came from New York.

 

03:04

And it also that was also our term for people who didn’t know how to sail. Oh, my God. So how did you end up end up there? I mean, my father grew up right nearby there. I lived there all his life. And my mother originally came from Brooklyn. But when they got married, they moved out onto the island. And he was a country lawyer and she was a school teacher. Oh, nice. I didn’t know that about you. That’s really sweet.

 

03:33

Do you remember the first time you were ever on a boat? You know, I don’t really, explicitly. We had a starboat fleet in town, and I do remember that one of the owners of a starboat took my father and me out for a little sail. Must’ve been like between races or when he was getting ready for regatta or something like that. I don’t know why my father must’ve asked him to. So I do remember vaguely that happening, but we were around boats all the time. We were…

 

04:02

We were in row boats and little sailboats at times and little motorboats and stuff like that. I just all, in those days, parents didn’t helicopter over their kids much. So we and I and my friends would just be out there hacking around, swimming and splashing around. So I don’t have any distinct memory for how it all exactly started. So that starboat, that must have been a Yorker who owned it, huh?

 

04:29

No, no, that was a local. No, no, definitely a local. So was there a little yacht club or anything that you came up through a sailing program? There is a yacht club there. It’s a Bellefort Bay yacht club. Still there. It’s a rickety little building on public on the public pier. One room, big open room in the middle of an uninsulated building. Membership was twenty five dollars a year. That’s a family membership.

 

04:59

And they had a sailing program and my parents enrolled me in it. So I went, uh, in prep, I was like 10 years old, I think maybe 11. So I thought, Oh, I better study up. And so I went and found a book on sailing. I read the book on sailing. And so when I showed up the first day of class, I knew a sheet from the hired, I knew all this other stuff. They immediately put me into the second year of sailing. It was it. Turns out, turns out the first year is covered in a book. I love that story.

 

05:27

That is so great. That is a preview of things to come, I think. I took a couple of years of sailing there, but it was all, it was not racing. That was, that was just sailing. You know, we’d went out in a Mercury with five, four or five people in it. And I learned all the things to do and so on and just enjoyed sailing. And that kind of set the tone for my whole life about sailing. I just, I just love sailing. And, and, and I’m

 

05:57

After a while, my parents bought me a Barnacut Bay sneak box. What is that? That’s the first I’ve heard of that. It’s a kind of sailboat. I think many of your listeners will recognize it. It’s from Barnacut Bay, of course, in New Jersey, and it was a boat that doubled as a duck blind. You could use it to shoot ducks from, or you could use it to go sailing. Oh my God. It’s a cat-rigged, gaff, gaff, cat-rigged boat.

 

06:27

very low to the water. And I just I loved it. I would I would go out in the morning, I’d do my chores, and just walk down to the water and get in a little rowboat, a little dinghy, go out to the mooring where our boat was, where the sneak box was and get in and put the sails up and go sailing. I didn’t come back in until it’s time for dinner. So and it wasn’t that was in racing is just just I just really somehow enjoy sailing.

 

06:56

Like an idyllic childhood. It really does. Well, I did race. There was a Yorker. There was a Yorker involved. Nobody was a good sailor. Dickie Heidelberger, and he owned a Beetle Cat. Yep. Do you know Beetle Cats? I do, but because they’re very much of an East Coast boat. Yeah, they are. Why don’t you tell our listeners what they are? I love them. It’s a cat boat, meaning just one mast and mainsail, and a gaff-rigged mainsail.

 

07:25

So very old fashioned, had a rudder that stuck out the back about three feet. And the load on that rudder, when you’re trying to steer the boat, when there was any kind of real breeze, was really an effort for kids. Sometimes both the skipper and I had to hang on to that tiller and pull on it as hard as we could. It was made out of oak and we can make it bend as we sail. So, and there was a spare tiller.

 

07:54

carried around just because the tiller could break when you buy this. A lot of weather helm. But it was a lot of weather helm. But uh but Dick was a great sailor and um he and I were in partnership for a while. Uh five, six years and uh by the time we got done, the last year we raced, we won literally every race we were in. Nice. Season champions. Oh, oh easily. We were seen to see the champions before that but this

 

08:24

That’s what that’s that was my introduction to sail it to racing, not as a skipper at all. Never skipper the boat was all this group. Yeah. Now they’re they have an unstayed rig, don’t they? There’s a head stay. The head stay. OK. And no shrouds. OK. So that’s some might. A big sick mass. The mass is. Yeah. That’s something that’s huge. Yeah. Like a telephone pole. I like a telephone pole. Exactly right. That’s exactly right. But with a pretty little or.

 

08:53

Herschoff looking little, uh, very pretty, uh, yeah. Cockpit. You know, there’s, there’s one of them in Newport in Rhode Island. It’s sitting by the side of the road, right? Let’s go get it. I don’t think you could say this one. I think it’s been turned into a flower pot. Oh, so we’ll get to your math. Career in a second, but you know, I think you, you took to sailing pretty quickly, didn’t you? And.

 

09:23

I always think of sailing as geometry, but we’ll get to that later. But tell me about how you took to sailing. As I said, we were doing with my friends and I just we were just around the water. It was just what you did in our in our little village. And right from the beginning, I just loved it. I have no idea why. I got to admit that I’m still kind of amazed that boats can actually go upwind using the wind. I mean, how does that work? Yeah. So that’s an airplane fly.

 

09:52

Well, this is power on the airplane. You know, keep it up there. I suppose that’s what keeps it up there. But with a sailboat, there’s a lot about sailing that I did it that I find still to this day sort of amazing. Yeah, yeah. I know you played hockey in the winter because everything was frozen, but you didn’t really take to that. No, I would. But in those days, the Bay froze over in the wintertime.

 

10:20

And so I was probably the only hockey player that ever learned how to play hockey on salt water ice. Wow. Which is a little different, but it was all, you know, it was pick up hockey and pond hockey. And then when I got to college and went to Dartmouth College and the freshman team was short of players and they sent out a note saying, has anybody played hockey and wanna join us? So I did, but I wasn’t the caliber they were. And so that only lasted a year. Oh.

 

10:49

So I wanted to ask you, were you good in math as a kid? And were you able to connect that to salmon? I was terrible in math. I still am. I still have that. My multiplication table still has sort of a vague, sort of a gray area out around the sixes to eights where I don’t know the answers. Oh, you make me feel better. And I flunked algebra in high school. Get out. Yeah.

 

11:18

Well, I got what they call circle 65, which is we rated on 100 point system, 65 was passing and a circle 65 means the kid didn’t actually do work at that level, but he was so good and worked so hard that the teacher took mercy and gave him a passing grade. Rob, that could have ruined you for life because you do know that that circle means you got an A in effort, but an F in the subject. That’s absolutely it. That is absolutely what that meant.

 

11:48

But then I took geometry, that was next year, actually, from a really good teacher, and I discovered logic. I discovered proofs. I discovered all that thought about how you construct, how mathematics is constructed from axioms and theorems. And I fell in love with that immediately. It’s just exactly how I like to think. So that’s really what got me into math. You mentioned, oh, my area is not topography, it’s topology.

 

12:16

Just for the record. But that’s about kind of a geometry that the properties in geometry that stay the same even if you stretch everything and wrap it around and turn it and bend it and everything like that. The string theory. So it’s still like strings. Yeah, stuff like that. Not theory is part of it. So that’s all that’s not calculations of stuff with numbers. It’s all thought and multiple, you know, you get used to dealing with.

 

12:44

high geometry, 10 or 11 dimension geometry. You know, my story, I was a math whiz in seventh and eighth grade. Nobody was better than me. I was the best kid in the school in math. I got to ninth grade. Oh no, I got to ninth grade, blanked algebra. No. Yep. I got a D, so I don’t know if I got an A for algebra, but I definitely got a D. Like me.

 

13:12

Man, I wish I’d known you then. I would have had some hope for the future. I could have gone to medical school. Well, in recent years, it’s occurred to me that maybe my PhD in math was sort of overcompensating. Oh, that’s pretty cool. I know, yeah, a weekend. So you went to Dartmouth College for undergrad. I did. And you were on their sailing team.

 

13:35

Yes, I was on the varsity sailing team all four years. We had a lot of fun. In those days, almost all of the teams were club teams. There were no coaches. So we had a team captain. Basically, he figured out who was going to go sailing each weekend. Remember at Dartmouth College, it’s up there in New England where it’s cold. And so there’s no sailing, no practicing.

 

14:02

through winter and into the early spring. So I spent most of my winters and springs on the Charles River in Boston or on the Thames River in Connecticut, sailing at other schools. And we would go down in a get pile into Volkswagen Beetle and off we’d go on country roads about 200 miles. And…

 

14:29

We’d find a place to stay overnight by just asking somebody if they’d let us into their dorm room. And we’d sail. But we did really well actually. We won our share regardless. Nice. Did the guys and girls at Yale, let you stay at their clubhouse? We stayed in dormitory rooms at Yale. We would just walk up to a dormitory and say, hi. We’re from Dartmouth College, we’re the sailing team. Then we have a place for us to stay.

 

14:58

There were almost always people who weren’t in their room. You know, they’d gone home for the weekend or were doing something else. And there were always beds, spare beds. And we took them. You know, it sounds really great. I, you know, Mary manager is a good friend and I know Stan and Sally and you know, it sounds like back then when there were no coaches and it was a club, you know, you had the club houses at the college level and it was just, it sounds like it was really great fun. It was a different sport.

 

15:26

And nowadays, even individual sailors have their coaches, not even teams. But in those days, the idea of a coach, I don’t think the word had any meaning to us. The idea of a personal coach would be nuts. Remember though, Dartmouth at the time was all male. So the social aspects of the club weren’t as good as they would have been if we’d had a co-ed. I didn’t realize that. That didn’t come, yeah, co-ed at Dartmouth didn’t come until a couple years after I graduated.

 

15:56

Oh, so it looks like you went to school for, you corrected me, 10 years. Receiving your bachelor’s in math. I did. Math. When did you find time to keep sailing and marry your lovely wife, Andy? We got married right out of college. Andy and I got together when we were in college and she went to a different college from me and so we didn’t get married until afterwards.

 

16:25

But no, I especially in graduate school, studying was, you know, the paramount. And I really, really busted my ass trying to stay up with math and with these geniuses who were math students with me. So the first year of graduate school, I didn’t, I didn’t sail. I had been sailing, of course, a lot at college on the team. And then in the summer times, I had been sailing, Belport Bay.

 

16:51

But then I didn’t figure I could do any sailing and still get my studies done for the first year. But at the end of the first year, no, I’m sorry, at the end of the second year, Andy found me sitting there reading the articles in the newspaper about sailing races and their results, even though I didn’t know all the people. I didn’t even know what the boats were. And she said, I think you need to go sailing. So she took me down and we went down to Corinthian Yacht Club. And I started sailing an OK Dini.

 

17:21

a wonderful little boat. I was able to do that along with my studies and my degree. And this was in Washington state? This was in Seattle. In Seattle. Yeah. University of Washington. OK. Six years to get a PhD. I think that’s about a normal time, isn’t it? I think it’s on the long side. You were sailing. You were having fun. And you and Andy met in high school. So did she live on the little island with you too?

 

17:50

Or was it high school off the island? No, this is Long Island. It’s not Long Island. It’s not little at all. It’s huge. But it’s 120 miles long, right? She lives on the North Shore, and she grew up by the water also, but all swimming and not so much boating. And I took her sailing, of course, a couple of times. We were friends. We weren’t lovers or girlfriend, boyfriend at all. She had her girlfriends, she had her boyfriends and I had my girlfriends. But we were very close friends. We shared all of our…

 

18:20

our secrets and our ideas and so on with each other. And that continued in college. We corresponded, oh, I’d say once or twice a week. No emails in those days, no letters. So, you know, about what we were learning and what we’re doing and what’s going on. At some point I thought to myself, you know, the person I’d really love to spend the rest of my life with is Andy. I knew she wasn’t quite up to that point yet, but I…

 

18:47

told her that would be all right with me. It was a standing offer anytime she wanted to take me up on it. I’d be happy to lock that in. And then one day I was discussing with her in the summertime, we were together in a car and telling her about a girl I was dating. And then I thought she’d be a great wife for somebody. She decided on the spot to take me up on the offer. And here it is, how many years later? 50, almost 60 years later.

 

19:16

Wow, wow, what an accomplishment. That’s probably your greatest accomplishment. Oh, by far. Yeah. Absolutely. No, no, no, no, in all ways, that’s the best accomplishment. Yeah, I kind of like her too. So you guys bought a 470 and raced it for seven years and won seven trials, yeah? Yeah, we were in Wisconsin and I had been sailing that okay dinghy by myself, of course, and single-handed boat.

 

19:46

and she’d been going around to regattas with me, but not sailing. And we thought, you know, it’d be fun if we sailed together. So we got a 470. We looked around for a two person thingy, any any boat would do. Turns out they were manufacturing Olympic class boats right down the road from us in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That was at Vanguard was the name of the company. Oh, yeah. We we bought one of those and we spent the first summer swimming basically, and then the next summer.

 

20:15

following the fleet around in the racing. And then we started to work our way up into the middle of the fleet. And after a while we were up at the front of it. We did qualify, in those days you had to qualify for the Olympic trials in 470s. We did qualify and we went to the trials. We raced against Dave Perry, who was in one of the other boats. Steve Benjamin was one of the other competitors. And of course, Mary Meninger, your friend and mine. Yeah.

 

20:44

So yeah, one of my claims to fame in that and later on in the J24s is that I’ve been beat by some of the best sailors. I’ve been beat by everybody. Even some of the not so best sailors. Oh my gosh. While you were in graduate school, you lived in Croatia. That must have been amazing then. It was part of Yugoslavia at the time.

 

21:13

Kito was still president, dictator basically. Yeah. Yeah, my dissertation advisor obtained a Fulbright for a year to go to Zagreb in Croatia to study with a, to work with a colleague of his. During that year, they actually developed a whole new branch of topology. So that was very productive. So Andy and I packed up our stuff and off we trotted to Zagreb. We spent the winter studying math there. We didn’t do any sailing.

 

21:42

of hiatus in our sailing careers. But we did visit the Dalmatian coast and saw it and thought, wow, this would be a great place to go sailing. In those days, of course, there’s no charter trade or anything like that. But I guess some other people have discovered that too since then. Was Lisa born yet? No, no, Lisa was born just after, in the summer right after I got my PhD, when we moved to Wisconsin.

 

22:10

She was born the first day of classes that I was teaching at a small college. I missed my first day. But the excuse was so good, everybody loved it. So the reason that was there for the birth of my daughter. Oh, that’s really sweet. And then when did you guys decide to go cruising? What did that come about? Wow. When, in 1984, Annie and I and Lisa, who was just a kid at the time,

 

22:38

took a year off of business, of our jobs, and at least the schooling, and went sailing for a year. So we bought a boat in Spain, sailed a 41 foot cruising boat, night, really nice one, sailed from Spain down to the Canary Islands and across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. And we spent winter in Eastern Caribbean, area you know pretty well.

 

23:06

I then sailed up to the Bahamas and home to Virginia, where we lived, and sold the boat and went back to work and back to school. But during that year, of course, part of the process was to decide whether that’s what we would enjoy doing at retirement. And we definitely decided it would be a wonderful thing to do. And so from then on, we basically saved up all the money we could to make sure that we could go sailing.

 

23:37

sailing. You retired early and you bought another boat and this was long this was 15 years now? Yeah well we owned the boat for maybe almost 20. Yeah in 1998 we bought a Stevens Custom 50 which is a Sparkman Stevens design just a beautiful boat I still think it’s the most beautiful boat I’ve ever seen. I love it we loved it we never regretted that that purchase from

 

24:06

People sometimes do, you know, they say after a few years they say, gee, I wish I hadn’t bought that boat. We just never felt that way. And so it was nice to be cruising in a boat where when people go by in their dinghies, they all hail and say what a beautiful boat. But we sailed at first we just while we’re still working we sailed all the way south to Trinidad from Virginia and all the way north to down East Maine. So basically pretty much as far north and south as you’d go on the East Coast.

 

24:34

Then when we retired, we took off, crossed the Atlantic, went to England, Ireland, Scotland, and then down to Spain, and we spent about four years in the Mediterranean. Went as far east as Turkey. Wow. Yeah, then we decided, okay, we’ve got more world to see. We sailed out of Gibraltar and down the Moroccan coast to the Canary Islands. And once again, we did an Atlantic crossing to Barbados.

 

25:03

and spent two winters in the Eastern Caribbean. And of course, insurance companies don’t like it if you’re there during hurricane season. So we scooted down to the ABC Islands, which are south of the hurricane zone for the summertime. But then we took off for the other end of the Caribbean. We sailed to Haiti, which is, by the way, which we enjoyed tremendously. And then Jamaica.

 

25:33

Cuba and all the way to Mexico. And by then summer was coming again and here came another hurricane so we scooted south to Colombia. Then we hacked around in the area around Colombia and the San Blas Islands of Panama for the next three or four years. We had planned to go right through the Panama Canal but when we found the San Blas Islands we said, wow, no place could be a better place than this. So beautiful place.

 

26:02

sand beaches and little islands with palm trees and clear water and there’s a big reef around the outside that protects you from the ocean waves and beautiful breeze because the trade winds come right through. I heard the people are really nice. It’s the Kuna Yala Indians and they’re just incredible, the Kuna Indians I’m sorry, and they are just the most wonderful people in the world which is great. And nobody else at the time, this is of course 20 years ago.

 

26:31

There was nobody, no other, there were probably 50 other cruising boats in the area in a, in a 100 and, I don’t remember what it was, but 100 mile square area. You are listening to the Good Jibes podcast brought to you by Latitude 38. We will be right back after a short break. You may be asking, how can I find my own copy of Latitude 38 magazine? Well, it can be as simple as walking into your marina,

 

27:01

Marine Store, Yacht Club, or any California waterfront business. You’ll likely connect with sailors when you walk in the door, and you’ll also find many more sailors as you read through the pages of Latitude 38. Bringing home a copy of Latitude 38 is also a great way to redecorate your coffee table, and reading one will help you unwind from the distractions of the day. It’s almost as good as a day of sailing itself. To find a copy of Latitude 38 near you, go to Latitude38.com

 

27:29

click on find the magazine at the top of the page. Then go out and meet some sailors.

 

27:37

Welcome back to the Good Jobs podcast. I’m Mo Roddy and our guest today is Rob Overton, past chairman of the Racing Rules Committee for US Sailing. Let’s continue with our guest. So you have had an incredibly full and busy life. Where did you find the time? How did you get into the racing rules of sailing? I know you have a good story, because I’ve heard it, but I want…

 

28:06

Our audience to hear it. OK, so a little background is that the racing rules were developed back in the 19th century for big yachts. They were these very rich people who had yachts like the America we all know about the America’s Cup. They had to have they realized they had to have special rules that the ordinary navigation rules don’t allow boats to get close together as you need to do when you’re racing.

 

28:32

And in particular, the one rule they started with was that they used to hire fishermen to go out and anchor to make marks. And then they would just squat and sail around the fishing boat. And the fishermen wouldn’t do it if the racing boats were allowed to hit the fishing boat. So they had to pass a rule right off the bat that you couldn’t hit marks. So that was the first rule. But they made other rules. And of course, originally, the rules had a lot of holes in them. And what they did was…

 

29:00

to patch the holes, they wrote more rules, and they wrote more rules and more rules and so on. And this happened all during the 20th century as well. So by the 80s, the rules were just a mess. I mean, it was almost impossible to read. There’d be a rule about some topic, and then 10 rules or 20 rules later, there’d be another rule about exactly the same topic, and, you know, you’d have to read both in order to understand what was going on. So it just, it was a real mess, really difficult to learn.

 

29:29

And so in 1993, the US Racing Rules Committee decided that they were going to take on a project which is to rewrite the rules from scratch, maybe even changing the game, the new rules. So Dick Rhodes wrote a column in One Design Sailor, which was the sailing magazine of the day. And he said, does anybody have any idea about the rules, about what’s wrong with the rules we’ve got and how we could change them? So I sat down and wrote a 17 page.

 

30:00

paper, an essay, what was wrong with the rules. And so I mailed it off, right? No email in those days. And I got a call a couple of weeks later from Bill Benson, who was the grand old master two-time gold medalist and the grand master of the rules. And he asked me a few questions about my paper. And he said, look, can you make it to Chicago from Virginia for the meeting we’re gonna have? There was no money for that, but I scraped up some money and…

 

30:28

figured out how to get there. So I came in and the rules committee meeting was about to start and they have chairs all around the outside for spectators. And so I sat down in one of the chairs and these spectator chairs were commonly filled. There are lots of people who love to hear rules committee discuss rules. I have no idea why, but anyway, so I sat down there and the first order of business was that Dick Rose, who was the chairman, went around to everybody.

 

30:55

who are the whole spectators and said, would you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about yourself? When they got to me, I gave him my name and Bill Benson stood up and he said, ah, Rob, you’re not supposed to be back there. You’re supposed to be up here at the table. So that’s how I discovered I was a member of the rules committee. Oh my gosh. And I’ve been a member ever since. Wow. Had you already been interested in judging and umpiring? Not at all.

 

31:25

I had, when we moved to Virginia, we sold the, the four 70 because there were no four seventies racing in Virginia. I bought a laser and sale that a lot. Um, eventually becoming the, the South, uh, Chesapeake Bay champion for several years. And, and so I got involved in, obviously, you know, I learned the game, I knew the game pretty well and I knew the rules actually pretty well.

 

31:51

But I had no interest at all in judging end at all. So that all came out of joining the rules committee. I discovered quickly that everyone else on the committee was already a national judge. And I thought it’d be a good idea to see the rules from the other side of the table, so to speak. I started judging in South Chesapeake Bay around Norfolk area and Hampton Roads. Then I eventually become a national judge. That took a long time.

 

32:21

Because in those days, the only way you became a national judge was to know national judges and get recommendations about your judging. And of course, there were no national judges within a couple hundred miles of me. So I never had a chance to serve on any protest committees with national judges, so I couldn’t become one myself. Now, of course, that’s all changed. We have a test. We have seminars that people take. It’s all.

 

32:49

And now we have Don, Don Winnock organizing everything. So it all works much, much better. And Zoom. So you can do hearings. You don’t have to. That’s right. Oh, it’s totally changed, hasn’t it, since the pandemic? Yeah. I got into umpiring through judging. Andy and I were big supporters of the local college sailing team, which is Old Dominion University.

 

33:16

Coach there was Gary Bodie, who eventually became the U.S. Olympic coach. Gary would let me come down and practice with the team, sailing FJs. I then would serve as a judge for his team race, regardless. And so in those days, you know, you just protested in a team race, just the way you do in a fleet race now, and you rode out the protest and there was a hearing after the racing was over. And so this is pretty terrible.

 

33:45

And we finally made it was an event as the championship for the mid Atlantic collegiate sailing Their championship there were enough protests on Saturday of that events this Saturday and Sunday There were enough events on Saturday So we were up until 2 o’clock in the morning hearing protests and we were hearing like 20 minutes per protests Well, that’s quick 15 minutes for a lot of them really quick and everybody said that’s it We cannot we can’t continue doing this. So they said we got to have umpires

 

34:16

And so I said, sure, I’ll do that. And so I became one of the first team race umpires in this country. We brought over some team race umpires from England, where they’d already been doing it, to teach us a little bit. I think I became the first national umpire in the United States who didn’t come at sports through match racing. We already had match race umpires. And so there were some people who were certified as umpires through that. But I think I was the first one to be certified just from team racing.

 

34:46

I’m still doing it. I’m an international umpire and I do probably, wow. That’s what I was going to say, not only- 20 events a year or something like that. A national umpire, you’re an international umpire now. Absolutely, absolutely. That’s awesome. You were the chairman of the racing rules committee for 16 years. Off and on. I was chairman right away. And when we got the new rules in 1997, I was the first-

 

35:14

I was the chairman for the first four years of that. I took off for a spell and then, I guess from 2004 to 21, I was chairman. The last eight years that I spent trying to find somebody to replace me. And I found plenty of good candidates. There were plenty of people who could have done the job that nobody wanted to. The US Racing Rules Committee works really hard. We work on looking at…

 

35:43

issues and rules and finding problems, solving them, making proposals to World Sailing to do it. And we meet every month for two hours by telephone. And there’s lots of emails in between and articles and stuff like that. So we work very hard. We’re the only country that does that. We’re very, very successful in that. Basically, when we send stuff to World Sailing to do proposals, they get accepted.

 

36:11

So it was World Sailing Met appointed. It’s you, David Dellenbaugh, and Dave Perry. That’s a little different. It’s a working party, right, for ruling a team? Yeah. So in addition to the Sailing and the Racing Rules Committee, I am also on two working parties. One of them is that I am the chairman of the Team Racing Rules Working Party, which means we write the appendix D, which is for team racing, and also the team

 

36:38

We write the team race call book. And let me put in a plug for that. If people want to learn the rules and also have some fun, the team race call book is a great place to go. The calls in there are basically decisions about rules when boats meet. And it’s easy to see the ones that are just team racing because those are about rules in appendix D. Everything else, which is about normal rules, the decisions that apply also to fleet racing. And

 

37:07

And it’s fun, it’s like taking a huge rules quiz with the answers right there in front of you. So I recommend it. Yeah. So let’s talk about, so the new rules come out, what, every four years, things are sort of tweaked and published. So what can we expect this year? Cause we’ve got a couple of days left before it goes into effect. Yeah, January 1st, 2025, new set of rules. There are some changes and simplifications in rule 18, which is about going around marks.

 

37:36

and Mark Room. Those were accomplished by a working party that I started with Dave Dellenbaugh and Dave Perry. The three of us got together, thought of some really great ideas for simplifying the role and the definition. We realized we wouldn’t be much credibility and internationally if it was just an American working party. So World Sailing appointed three more members from all over, from Brazil and Australia and UK.

 

38:06

So the six of us sat down and worked really, really hard on rule 18. With the result that now I think I actually understand the rule. I’m not sure I did before. No, don’t say that, Rob. It’s really complicated. And you get in, I mean, you know, the devil’s in the details, right? Yeah. Let’s get into a little question about what happens in this particular situation. We’ve had every two weeks for two hours by telephive, by Zoom. We worked our tails off on that.

 

38:36

We submitted our ideas to World Sailing and we just got shot down totally. No. Yeah, almost nothing. Almost nothing that we proposed actually got accepted. So we went back to work and instead just worked on minor improvements that we thought could be made. And we did and they accepted just about everything we proposed. So we did get a little bit of simplification but nothing like in proportion to the amount of work we put into it. Wow.

 

39:05

Well, what did you get? What can racers look to? So what you can look for in rule 18 is that the definition of mark room is way simpler and says exactly the same thing as before. But it’s way simpler. That’s just word, just easy to read. Much easier to read. It also puts an endpoint to when mark room has been given it, which is when the mark is clear astern of the boat that is entitled to it. And that didn’t used to happen. So now we know exactly when.

 

39:35

It’s over. And rule 18 now says specifically that it stops applying when Mark Room has been given. So as soon as the mark is clear, a stern of the vote that’s entitled to Mark Room, that’s it. We’re done. That didn’t used to be clear. Sort of everybody’s ideas. Is that kind of what happened? But it wasn’t written down anywhere. The main part of the rule about going around marks is the one we all know about when you get to the zone.

 

40:04

If you’re clear ahead, then you’re entitled to mark room from everybody clear astern of you. And if you’re overlapped inside other boats, then they have to give you mark room. If boats are overlapped inside you, then you have to give them mark room. And that stays throughout the entire rounding, right? So it doesn’t change as you get closer to the mark. If the overlaps are broken or changed or whatever, it doesn’t matter. The boats have been singled out as they either owe you a mark room or you owe them mark room. The problem is that the way the current role is worded,

 

40:34

pre 2025 rule. There’s a gap. It talks about what happens if you get to the zone clear ahead and it talks about what happens if you get to the zone overlap. But it doesn’t say anything about what happens if you get to the zone clear astern. It turns out that because of the way the rule works, that if that happens, that means the other boat was ahead of you and outside the zone.

 

41:02

So it all works out in the end in the current rule. But it’s a gap. It’s a logical gap. And so we change the wording on that. It makes the rule harder to read, I think. But if you think your way through that rule, which is now rule 18.2a, if you work your way through that, you’ll see that it comes out the same. So there’s no change to the sailor. And in fact, I’d like to point that

 

41:31

and you’re used to sailing and you know the game, then just keep sailing on that same game. It has not changed. And you don’t actually need to learn about the changes. On the other hand, if you feel like you wanna refresh your idea about the rules, you should go to the new rule book and learn the new rules, not the previous ones. There’s a joke that says everybody sails according to the rules they learned when they were 16 years old. And there’s a certain truth to that.

 

42:01

But which is not towards you, it’s not a good idea. Because they have changed a lot since then for most people who aren’t 16. But the other big change, the other real noticeable change in the rules for next time is there’s a rule, the number of it is 14, and it’s the rule that says you should avoid contact. That has always meant you should avoid contact with other boats. It doesn’t matter if you’re the right away boat or you’re the keep clear boat.

 

42:31

It doesn’t matter. You’re responsible for making sure you don’t have contact with them boats. It’s a really important rule. And it really singles out our sport as different from most other sports. And it is literally a non-contact sport and there’s an actual rule that says so. The problem with that rule is it’s maybe too limited. Suppose that you’re a right away boat and at the start,

 

42:58

you manage to force the KeepClear boat to run into the committee boat. Well, they didn’t run into you and all the rule says is you avoid contact with them. It doesn’t say anything about avoiding mayhem between them and the committee boat and that’s wrong. We really do want to avoid that too. So the new rule says exactly that, that a boat should avoid contact with another boat.

 

43:25

And furthermore, contact between other boats and between boats and objects that could cause damage. So now under the new rules, running that boat into the race committee boat is a race of rule because you didn’t do it all you could to avoid contact. Do you get exonerated if you were forced to do it? Yes, you do. But the problem is that if you’re a right away boat right now under the current rule,

 

43:55

You don’t have to actually take action to avoid contact until it’s clear that the other boat is going to break a rule. Now you’ve got to try to stay away. But until that moment, you could just sail on da dee da because you believe that he’s going to obey the rules. You can assume, in other words, that he’s going to obey the rules until he doesn’t. But now that we’re talking about other boats than that immediate boat, the question is, do you have to?

 

44:25

worry about them too. So for example, suppose I force a boat to run into another boat who runs into another boat, who runs into yet another boat and causes damage. Did I have to take action before that third collision was going to happen? Did I have to know that the furthest boat upwind there away from me was not going to obey the rules? And when did I know that? So it’s a little bit more complicated. I think they didn’t take this through totally, but there will be a case. I’m pretty sure of it.

 

44:55

A case book is a bunch of authoritative answers on questions about the rules. And there’ll be a case and we’ll learn what that says. And I think that’ll be better. Basically it’s a better rule. So I’m happy with it. What about part five? Yeah, part five. So the other big deal is part five is the part of the rules about protests, redress, hearings and misconduct.

 

45:23

That is a little bit like those rules before 1997. That is, it’s a jumble. It’s developed over time. Originally, boats protested other boats. And then we put in the protests that race committees could protest. And then protests can protest. And now, measures who are really called something like technical committee can protest. So there was a separate rule about each of those. And they all basically said the same thing.

 

45:51

the new section five consolidates those rules and it solves some other strange little problems that were in that section and reorganizes everything nice and logically so that everything having to do with the same topic, all the rules that have one topic are together, but of course that’s not where they were before. And so if you know that section or you use it the way we judges have to do, then you’re gonna have to

 

46:21

relearn how the whole thing works. But the same rules basically are there. It sounds like it eliminates the treasure hunt for what, for a particular- I don’t know. I would hate to promise that. Yes, but that’s part of the idea. I tell you, one amusing little feature, a bug in the current rules is that there’s a rule about grounds for redress. What, you know, what-

 

46:49

A redress shall be based on the possibility that certain things have happened. So that tells you when you can apply for redress. But there’s no rule saying when a protest committee can, on what grounds they can grant redress. So theoretically, if you file for redress because an action of the protest of the race committee, we can decide that the race committee did nothing wrong, but the heck will give you redress anyway, because there’s no rule that says we can’t.

 

47:20

And now they’ve changed that so that all of these conditions, which are exactly the same as before, are listed in the rule about when we can grant redress. So you can apply for redress on any grounds you like, but the only way we grant it is if those conditions are met. So that’s the kind of logical fix that’s in there. I would say not to worry about it again.

 

47:44

Okay, there’s a real good clarification on something that really I deal with it on race committee and that’s the Flags for abandoning races. Oh Mo I’m so glad you mentioned this So on rule 18, I know how that all the changes came about there because I was on that rule 18 working party and I know how the changes to

 

48:10

Part five happened that that was a bunch of people on the World Sailing Racing Rules Committee who decided to take that under their wing. They formed a working party for that. And I’m not sure how the rule 14 change happened, but I do know how this change about abandonment happened because I did it. If you look at the current rule book, there’s a section on the race signals, there’s pictures of the flags and a little description underneath of what each flag means.

 

48:39

And the descriptions under AP over A and AP over N, which are abandonment of races and either go ashore and wait for further instruction or go ashore and we’re done for the day. They didn’t have anything on it. They just said, all races are abandoned. That’s it. And then go ashore. There’s going to be more. But it didn’t say what races were abandoned. And we actually had an incident here.

 

49:08

San Francisco Bay where a protest committee abandoned all the races in a day when there was a squall that came through and they abandoned all the races for that day, even though even the two races that had been completed in beautiful sunshine, bluebird weather, because that’s what it says. All races are abandoned. And we try to follow the rules word to word. So I said, no, that’s not what they meant. They need to abandon all the races that are in progress when the signal goes up.

 

49:36

So I put those words in or proposed to, took that proposal to the US Racing Rules Committee. We think around with it a little bit as we always do. And then made a proposal to World Sailing or to the Board of Trustees at US Sailing, have to approve all these. Then to World Sailing. And I made up the arguments that went to World Sailing to convince them and help them get convinced. And ta-da, there it is. So that’s Rob’s rule.

 

50:04

My opinion is that. And it’s going to be AP over? I’m sorry, AP over N, right? And AP over A. Okay, AP over N November means the race is in progress? No, it means all races in progress are abandoned. Okay. Right? Yeah. And get out your rule book, Mom. I don’t have it here in front of me, but I just want to make, you describe it for the audience. I want to make sure.

 

50:31

Dave Perry says, never tell anybody what a rule says without having the rule book open in front of you. And I think that’s probably a good guide. N over H says, now, it used to say all races are abandoned. Now it says all races in progress are abandoned. Further signals are sure. And N over A, which is all races are abandoned, all races in progress are abandoned.

 

50:57

no more racing today. So the only thing I put in is in progress. Nice. Nice. All right. So everybody, if you’re listening to this, watch those flags. Watch those flags. Right. And don’t come to the committee vote and say, what does that mean? Open your rule book. Don’t go to the committee vote and say, what does that mean? I think that’s, yeah. Most people have a little guide to those signals. Don’t they paste it on the front edge of the cockpit or something? Yeah. And if you don’t, you should.

 

51:27

Yeah. Okay. And one last question real quick before we go to our lightning round. Why do the rules change every four years? It all has to do with the Olympics. At world sailing, at least the Olympics are a really big deal. US sailing has a lot of missions. They do community sailing programs. They do training instructors. They do cruising. They do all kinds of stuff in addition to racing. But world sailing basically only has one function.

 

51:57

and that is racing. And they are dominated by the Olympics. Almost all of their income comes from the International Olympic Committee. And so the rules are based on the Olympic cycle. The idea is we set up the rules the first year of an Olympic cycle, and then the competitors who are preparing to go to the Olympics can race under the same rules for four years. So our entire structure of how we do the rules

 

52:26

is done in order so that 100 or so people don’t have to learn new rules. Wow. Yeah, pretty amazing. Yeah. But it’s a good idea to not change them every year. I’m happy that that we only do it every four years. You are listening to the Good Jibes Podcast, brought to you by Latitude 38. We will be right back after a short break. Hey, Good Jibes listeners, are you looking to sail more?

 

52:56

It’s the biggest mismatch on the California coast. There are thousands of boats not sailing because they need crew and thousands more sailors or soon to be sailors who want to sail but can’t find a boat. For over 45 years, Latitude 38 has been connecting boat owners with sailors to sail or race the bay or travel far over the horizon. Some connections have turned into thousands of blue water cruising miles or race winning crews or long-term relationships or just happy days of sailing.

 

53:23

If you have a boat or want to crew, add your name to the Latitude 38 crew list at Latitude38.com. You don’t know where such a simple act will take you. All right, well here’s our lightning round. So this is just where people get to know you better. So let’s start with what’s your favorite book about sailing?

 

53:45

What do you think? The rule book? The rule book! Oh my god, that was a loaded question.

 

53:55

No one else has ever said the rule book, Rob. No one.

 

54:00

Well, that’s my favorite book about sailing, no question. But also about the rules, my favorite book actually describing the rules is Dave Perry’s book on the rules. Which is really good. Yeah, it’s pretty good. You and Donald are so much alike. I have such a vivid memory of the two of you playing pool at our house at the pool table. And you guys were arguing about a play or something. Next thing I know, you guys have the rule book out for…

 

54:26

A friendly game of eight ball. That’s exactly right. Oh my God. It was so funny. All right. So what’s your favorite book not about sailing? Well, I don’t know. I have a lot of favorite books, I guess. I like Moby Dick. There was a book I taught actually I taught from a long time ago when I was a college professor and the name of it is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s not it has nothing to do with Zen Buddhism and it doesn’t have much to do with motorcycles.

 

54:56

But it’s about basically whether beauty is a real thing or whether it’s just a human construct.

 

55:09

Is your favorite sauna really actually better? Or is it just you like it and society has decided that it’s better? And when you do a little fixed to your motorcycle with a little piece of aluminum that you got out of aluminum can that works, is that sort of trashy or is that brilliant? Yeah. And you taught a course on that. I’m gonna have to get the class. I did. I’m serious, yeah.

 

55:39

What was your favorite trip you’ve ever taken?

 

55:43

Well, 40,000 miles or so of blue water sailing we did. I think that was my favorite trip. That was a 15 year long trip. I think you win on that answer. By the way, I enjoy sailing upwind as much as I do downwind. There’s a saying that says gentlemen don’t go upwind. But if that’s the case, that means they mean there are no gentlemen racing sailboats because we go upwind more or less half the time.

 

56:13

No, and I feel actually, I mentioned before that I’m sort of amazed the boats can go up wind using the wind and I like the motion of the boat. I like everything about beating the windward. When we did our 40,000 miles, about 15,000 of those were actually beating up wind. You are so lucky your marriage survived. Oh yeah.

 

56:38

I didn’t ask her. No, that’s not true. Because remember, Andy and I raced a 470. So we’ve done a lot of upwind racing too, and a J2040. So if you could have beer with anyone, alive or dead, who would that be? A glass of beer. I know you like beer. I could have chosen coffee, but I know you like a beer every now and then. Yeah, my mom and dad. Oh, that’s sweet. Why? Long ago departed, I’m afraid. But.

 

57:06

Because I keep on having questions I want to ask them. I mean, even now, wow, 30 years after my mother died and 50 years after my father died, I still, every once in a while think, oh, I gotta ask mom that. I asked mother and you know, she’s not here. So that’s, they’re my inspiration and I really love them. So I would love to.

 

57:35

Love to see them again, but that’s not gonna happen. I think people don’t realize, you know, the nursery is coming out now, but the mothers are profound when they pass away because they take our history with them. I don’t know if you remember asking, mom, what did I do when I was two? Or mom, did I do this? Or mom, did I do that? I mean, I think losing a father is difficult too, but moms are, there’s something about losing a mom. Yeah. Yeah, my questions to my father are more that he really,

 

58:05

he shaped my life philosophy and how I think. And my mother, as you say, she was the part of it. You know, she is the historian. The questions I think of that I would love to ask my mother tend to be about what happened then, what happened in that situation. And my father would be more like, well, what do you do in such a situation? What’s your advice? Yep, exactly. So on that note,

 

58:35

totally off the wall, but what’s the most important lesson you’ve learned over your professional career? That is so important to maintain your integrity. And I, you see people, and I think in the modern day, that’s really even a bigger lesson than it was when I was working. I worked for a company that was absolutely on integrity. I mean, it was just a rule. Nobody did anything ever that might be possibly questionable. We were a government contractor. We always…

 

59:04

Our mode of operations, we do whatever is best for the government. It doesn’t matter whether we make a profit or not. That sort of idea that made working at that company just a wonderful experience. And I’m afraid that working at some companies nowadays that were founded originally with the idea of doing good would be a little trying for me because they slip and start doing stuff that’s just for profit. And that’s a shame. Yeah, it’s happening more and more. But I have a second thing.

 

59:33

that I’d like to tell you. Because my career was as a mathematician, right? First as a professor and then in the private sector, that we had to sign up on the wall and said, no matter what problem is, no matter how complex it is, there’s a simple answer. And it’s wrong. What? It turns out you have to think things through. It’s as you just, the common sense answer to a lot of questions just isn’t right. Wow. It’s the wrong answer.

 

01:00:04

That’s Hetty. What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from sailing? Oh, I say it all the time. There’s nothing in the world like dawn at sea. I love being offshore. I love being outside, out of sight of land. And especially at the end of a watch. You know, you have the four to eight watch and you’re there and you’re tired and the sun barely peaks up and then

 

01:00:34

pops up and hopefully you got a cup of coffee and yeah, just to get to contemplate that. You know that as well as I do. Yeah, I love that feeling. You’ve done more offshore alone than anybody I know. And so you know, you know what that’s like. No, no, no. There’s lots of people who’ve done way more than me. Who’s inspired you most in your life? Oh, Andy, for sure. Yeah, no question. She’s my, she’s my.

 

01:01:03

my rock, my strength and my motivator and Lisa, my daughter, who is the brightest person I know and I learned from her every day. Sweet. What’s your favorite place in the world to sail? Oh, I think of San Blas Islands where we spent about three years of our lives. It’s just so gorgeous and we just loved it there so much. Just for sailing, just for the sailing. We would be at anchor for a week or so in some

 

01:01:32

at some lonely deserted island. And we’d say, you know what, even though it’s beautiful here and we’re enjoying the fishing and swimming and everything, let’s go sailing. So we would raise our anchor and just go sailing for only a few miles to another island and anchor again. But we just enjoyed the sailing there just so much because it was beautiful trade winds, no ocean waves because it’s a big reef. So.

 

01:02:00

That was that was the best sailing we’ve ever done. No, they turn her down there. I have to go cuz I think so No, I do not believe so So what’s the one question? You wish I’d asked but I didn’t ask and how would you answer it? Okay I’m oh most says Rob what drew you into the rules so much? Why did you get it involved in that so much? And my answer would be to two answers one is

 

01:02:29

their connection to mathematics and logic and so on. I enjoy the look at that. And I have always been a word person. I was the best English student in high school, got a scholarship with real money. So I like words and I like how words fit together and what they mean and so on. And that fits a lot together with my mathematical background and logic and deduction. So there’s that. But what I like about the rules is, this brings me back to Zen and the motor cycle.

 

01:02:59

In real life, we have rules for our conduct. And they’re very…

 

01:03:07

imprecise and they depend on motivation. You know, most of us don’t lie normally, but there are circumstances in which we surely would. You would lie to avoid telling a friend something that would devastate them or so on, right? I mean, you know, these are all situational and you have to figure every… So everything you do in life, you have to figure it out and find out what the rule is. It’s not… They’re just not all written down.

 

01:03:36

And sports are different. Sports are a great opportunity to get out of that. When I do something and it hurts somebody else in real life, I feel compassion for that person. I think to myself, well, maybe I shouldn’t have done that. But when I start to attack somebody and he has to duck me and I win the race, I don’t feel that way at all. Because it’s a different environment. The rules are a nice fixed framework. And I just love that. I think it’s so cool to be able to escape

 

01:04:05

moral structure of real life into a world in which there is a huge structure, but the structure is all written down, it’s very precise, and we have to do exactly what it says. I love that about sailing in general. It’s really cool. Yeah, I agree. And I think…

 

01:04:26

Of course, when you’re sailing, you don’t, you know, just out there sailing, you don’t have that kind of rules. But you have a lot of structure because of the safety issues, don’t you? You have to know everything’s in order. You have to know the engine’s going to start. If you get in trouble, you have to know when you got a reef down sails and so on. I think there is the same kind of structure, isn’t it? So much of a moral structure as a necessity.

 

01:04:56

And that’s good. I like that structure. Yeah. Mathematician. So final thoughts, Rob, do you have anything you’d like to leave the audience with as we wind this up? Okay. So I want to make a pitch for the rules. And that is, you know, if you’re, if you want to race sailboats and you don’t know the rules, really, you don’t feel confident in your knowledge of the rules. There’s two outcomes. One of which is almost certain to happen. One is,

 

01:05:26

You’re going to be overly cautious. You’re not going to be up on the starting line at the start. You’re going to be. Swing big, wide arcs around marks instead of going near them and losing ground every time, and you’re going to come in at the back of the fleet. Um, the other possible outcome is you’ll do things that are against the rules. And you’ll mess up everybody, including yourself. And you might be protesting for you might not, but in any case, it’s a bad outcome.

 

01:05:56

for all of us. So you really do have to learn the rules. And they are simple enough. You could sit down, the rules about right away are only, I think, six pages or something like that. And it’s only an afternoon’s work to sit down and read them through. If you don’t understand them, as I said, try the Jim Ray’s Call Book or Dick Perry’s book on the rules. But it’s not a lot of work and it really pays off. I know you’re doing something at the San Francisco Yacht Club.

 

01:06:26

on a monthly basis and is that open to other clubs? Yes it is, absolutely. It is a little round table and we call it Chowder Talk and it’s at 4.30 in the afternoon on the days in which the Regatta Pro races are held on a circle. We just sit around and we talk about rules and I usually, I always prepare something. So.

 

01:06:56

talk about it. But in practice, I almost never get to that because people have questions about things that happen on the rest course and questions they had when they read the rules. And so if you read the rules and you got a question and you wanna know what other people think about it, come to those chalk talks. They’re at San Francisco Yacht Club in Tiburon at 4.30 in the afternoon, Saturdays, the days of the Regatta Pro.

 

01:07:24

Regattas, which are the first or second. There’s one next week, I think. Next Saturday. Not yet, but coming up. Not yet. Yeah. Cool. Anybody who’s listening, if you want to learn more, keep that in mind. And I think there’s also online seminars every now and then for, I mean, basic judge seminars would be a good place to start to. Even though you don’t want to be a judge, you will learn a little bit about the rules. I think you would, but I would suggest maybe that’s not the best place.

 

01:07:52

Dave Dellenbaugh just gave a whole series which you could still subscribe to as a webinar. So it’s all lecture by Dave Dellenbaugh. It costs $55 and you get all the recordings to everything that happens. So even though it’s not real time, you get the same information. And he and Dave Perry ran that and it was excellent. A little long. It went on for, I don’t know, eight hours.

 

01:08:20

So it gets a little dry maybe, but you can skip through it. I mean, you don’t have to stick, you don’t have to do it in real time. But I suggest, I recommend that. You get your money’s worth and then when you wanna ask questions, you come to the Chalk Talk at San Francisco Yacht Club. There you go. All right, well, I’m gonna wind this up and I just wanna thank you, Rob, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to be my guest today and explain a bit about the new racing rules.

 

01:08:49

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