World Council Member Applications

The ICA is required to announce when applications for membership of the ICA World Council are received.

Accordingly we can announce that the following applications have been received:

Country NCS/NCA WC named person
Australia NCS Andrew Cook
Austria NCS Eric Gielen
Brasil NCA Percy Glaser
Czech Republic NCS Jan Hyk
Chile NCS Jorge Eichholz
France NCA Stephan Gibaud
Germany NCA  Udo Reutter
Greece NCS Abraham Onassiadis
Hungary NCS Zoltan Illes
Ireland NCS Vangelis Simonidis
Italy NCS Gianluca Montecchi
Netherlands NCA Remco Sol
New Zealand NCS Karl Stachel
Portugal NCS Jorge Camilo
Switzerland NCA Reto Brunschweiler
UK NCA Graham Elliott
USA NCA Craig Huzway

These applications will be accepted by the ICA after 4 weeks have elapsed unless another person or group from one of these countries also makes an application.

 

National Insights

Hi Everyone

In previous posts I mentioned that I had started to survey the RG65 Nations so that I could get a better understanding of how the RG65 class is established around the world and how the Nations run and manage the class.

I asked the 18 nations that we have contact details for and so far 14 have replied. This is a fantastic response rate and I would like to thank all of you who took the time to reply and share so much information with me. If you have not yet replied, please do so when you can.

I won’t go into too much detail but I think that it is worth me sharing some basic insights with you, and please fee free to add your own comments to this. The more information that I have the better I can direct how we move forwards.

The first part that I gathered information on what how big the class was in each region. It is always difficult to get accurate figures on because boats come an go. Just because someone built and sailed a boat 5 years ago does not men that that boat still exists. So much of this information is a “gut feel” and we cannot expect more. Fredo shared with me that around 1,000 kits for an RG65 were sold in Argentina, but we know that only a fraction of these ever made it to the water.

National Class Sizes

The responses from the 14 Nations show that on average there are 104 boats per nation, with a maximum of 300 and a minimum of 1. This is quite a wide spread as I am sure you will agree.

Number of actively raced Boats

Of those Boats that exist, how many are “actively used”. Here we see the the range from 0% to 100%, and this equates to an average of 30 boats per nation that are active. The largest being the UK with 125 and France with 90, Germany 60 and so on. It would be great if we could, by raising the profile of the RG65 class, get these numbers up significantly.

National Championships

I followed on with some questions about National Championships in the countries. Here we see that 6 Nations hold a National every year, 2 Occasionally and a further 5 plan to start holding National Championships. Of the 8 Nations that currently hold events, the average number of entries is 24, ranging from 10 (USA) to 35 (UK)

Class Associations

When asked whether a Class Association existed in the country, 9 Nations confirmed that they had some sort of class association, and of those 5 were recognised by their National radio sailing authority.

Sailing Authority

Asked what “Sailing Authority” the class sails under, 6 sail under World Sailing, 1 under NAVIGA, 5 under “Other” (I still ned to dig a bit more what Other is), and 1 indicated that they Don’t Know.

The last area that I surveyed was about the future. How they felt a future ICA Constitution and Class Rules should look like, and the results from these are much as I expected.

Future Constitution

50% of the respondents indicated that they would like the Constitution to fall under the World Sailing umbrella, 14% do not mind, and 36% would like to it be totally independent. This needs further exploration and I will enter into some direct discussion with the nations to decide the best way forward.

Class Rules

The alignment of the Class Rules to a Sailing Authority was exactly the same as the Constitution, 50% World Sailing and 36% independent. But what is overwhelmingly clear is that everyone wants the Rules to remain fundamentally as they are. By that I understand the view to be that the boat length, mast height, sail area and self certification concepts should not change.

My Conclusion

Well I don’t really have a clear conclusion yet. I will engage with some of the National Representatives who have not given clear views one way or another so that I can get a better understanding of what direction we should follow, and I will try to complete this within a week or 2, whereafter I will come back with some proposals.

Thanks you for your patience as we go through this process. I need to understand fully what the Class wants before I start to propose any changes, and as you can see from the results above, there are some very differing views. In the end we will need to find a solution that works for the majority.

Please keep your opinions flowing. It is Your class.

Best regards

Wayne

Future Directions for the 65 Class: A Joint Statement

After cooperating with the Work Group set up by IRSA, the following Joint Statement has been agreed. The possibly most important words included are those that recognize “the RG65 ICA, an Independent Class Organization, not affiliated to any International Association”. This Category is also recognized in IRSA´s Constitution, and allow the Class to develop all the usual events, with the only exception of those that include the terms “World”, “Continental” and Championship” in their denomination.

Future Directions for the 65 Class: A Joint Statement
November, 2017

65 Class Rules Working Party Forum

This Forum was set up in March 2017 within the IRSA site to bring IRSA, the worldwide radio sailing organization as an affiliated member of World Sailing, together with delegates from the RG65 ICA, an Independent Class Organization, not affiliated to any International Association, and a substantial Observer Group from both organizations.

The prime purpose of the forum was to focus on a set of proposed rules developed by IRSA that would be acceptable for international and continental championships under WS and IRSA guidelines.

Over the ensuing months many items were discussed and many changes agreed on resulting in a newly named set of rules for the international community: 65 Class Rules. This name variation is intended to separate those rules in custody with the RG65 ICA from those now to be published that are in the international standard IRSA format.

The IRSA delegates would like to thank the RG65 ICA delegates and the contributing members of the Observer Group for their valuable input into helping make these 65 Class Rules more acceptable and viable for international competition.

IRSA hopes that the rule discussions have established more confidence in the way we act as an international organization and we also hope that the RG65 ICA and IRSA can work more closely to further advance this class with its growing popularity.

Similarly the RG65 ICA delegates would like to thank the IRSA for the work done in developing the proposed rules and bringing this forum together as part of their ongoing support of International RC Yachting.

In the near future IRSA will publish the updated 65 Class Rules including the agreed changes. This means that international events using these 65 Class Rules can then be run with the confidence that they are under the authority of World Sailing and the IRSA.

RG65 ICA Delegates

IRSA Delegates

RG65 is able to continue operating as it has for the last 40 years.

Early in 2016 IRSA wrote a set of ‘internationally acceptable’ rules for the RG65 class and submitted them to the RG65-ICA for comments. In April 2016 these rules were shared with the RG65 community. These rules were rejected after consultation with you, the RG65 community, in June 2016.

After that IRSA insisted on setting up a Workgroup with RG65-ICA to go over their rules and discuss them. Starting in March 2017 and for the next nine months a team of three representatives for IRSA, three representatives for RG65-ICA and about 20 observers from both sides were able to ask questions about any item in the rules.

The RG65 team worked hard to get IRSA to adopt the current RG65 rules without modification. After a lot of negotiation it became apparent that this would not be possible and so the ICA team sought to protect the RG65 class in its current state. The Workshop has never the less been a very rich experience that exposed the complexities of rule writing. It also showed how passionate we are about our class.

IRSA continued to, and still do, want to establish a set of rules which would be suitable for competition at World Championship level under World Sailing/IRSA and the ICA team worked with IRSA to adjust their proposed rules so that they reflect much of what the RG65 class stands for. This was achieved in some cases but not in others.

The result of all this, culminating in the recently released Joint Statement, is that the RG65 class will continue to operate as it always has done. But in addition IRSA will soon release this set of rules that will allow competition at a World, Continental and International Championship level. As things stand, the vast majority of boats that currently comply with the RG65 rules (published in 2014) will also be able to comply with the new IRSA rules .

But again, let’s be clear, the only people that would need to ensure that they comply with these IRSA rules are the people that want to take part in the World, Continental and International Championships run by IRSA.

Through this process we have ensured that the RG65 class is able to continue operating as it has for the last 40 years.