New Rules for 2009-2012

As many of you know, the International Sailing Federation updates the Racing Rules of Sailing (RRS) once every 4 years. They do this right after the summer Olympics. The idea is that 4 years of working with the rules should be enough to find the issues and now the time has come to make updates. Starting on January 1st, there will be new rules that govern racing.
If you've been racing many years like me, you remember the big changes they made in 1997. Wow, that was hard to have so many new rules in one year! Even though lots of work was put in making the 1997 rules, there was still confusion about interpretation and applying the rules on the water.
You can breathe easy – there are not many changes to the RRS for 2009-2012. If you've been keeping up with the cases and appeals, you will find that very little has changed. Here are the main changes:

• two boat-length "zone" around marks is now (usually) three
• rounding marks and passing obstructions – new words, same basic meaning
• rule 17.2 is gone (not really a big deal)

The Royal Yachting Association has put together an extensive presentation on the new rules. I've uploaded it to the files section here. There is a lot of info there (121 slides!), but many conceivable situations are discussed.
For those of you interested in a discussion of the new rules, I intend to post individual topics on this Wednesday Night Sailing Blog. Feel free to comment and ask questions. If there are questions on a specific situation, email me and I can work on answering you. (Address is on the right near the bottom of the bar.)
Marshall