And why empty fuel cans will no longer meet offshore flotation regulations. STAN HONEY

To quote Alan Green: ‘The first international Special Regulations in 1968-70 were an amalgam of those applied by the clubs (including the RORC and the Cruising Club of America) that had run offshore races since the early part of the 20th century. The early regulations were very basic compared with those of today. Liferafts were unknown and a typical requirement was for a yacht’s tender or dinghy “capable of laying out a kedge anchor”. For buoyancy a dinghy could have empty petrol tins lashed under the thwarts.’

The purpose of the Offshore Special Regulations (OSR) is to establish uniform minimum equipment, accommodation and training standards for safety at sea for small to large sailing boats that are transferable between countries.

The Offshore Special Regulations were administered by the Offshore Racing Council (ORC) until 2002 when the administration of the OSR was transferred to the International Sailing Federation (ISAF). The OSR are developed and maintained by an international group of interested sailors selected by their ISAF Member National Authority. The Special Regulations sub-committee meets once a year at the ISAF annual conference under the chairmanship of Will Apold (Canada). Final approval of the sub-committee’s recommendations is then considered by the ISAF Oceanic and Offshore Committee chaired by Stan Honey (USA).

The overall safety programme consists of the Offshore Special Regulations, a training manual for personal safety at sea, and a series of training sessions at locations around the world.

The regulations are currently being redrafted to make them more user-friendly with web-based tools. Over the years the regulations have become mandatory requirements interspersed with recommendations and advice, which not only makes for a larger document but often leads to misunderstandings.

In addition to separating the regulations from the recommendations and guidance, future presentation of the OSR on the website will be enhanced. The website will enable a skipper to answer a few questions about the boat of interest such as overall length, whether it is a monohull or multihull, fixed or canting keel and boat age and category of event, after which a specific, tailored report of relevant requirements will be generated for downloading.

The OSR aim of improving safety at sea developed into programmes to have new yacht designs reviewed by independent certifying agencies (Design Plan Review). Following the 1979 Fastnet, ORC commissioned the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) to publish the Guide to the Design and Build of Offshore Yachts. At the same time a system of plan approval was also established with plans approved by ABS.

Following the withdrawal of ABS from the scheme, this was replaced in January 2010 by a requirement for Category 2 races (like the Fastnet) for yachts to have been designed, built and maintained in accordance with the requirements of ISO 12215 Category A (International Standards Organisation, Small Craft – Hull Construction and Scantlings) or classification society rules, depending on size. Yachts shall carry onboard a certificate of building plan review from a notified body recognised by ISAF. Since this scheme began in 2010, 110 Plan Review certificates have been issued including 36 Production Series Plan Review certificates.

The main bodies conducting the plan reviews are DNV-GL (the merged Det Norske Veritas (Norway) and Germanischer Lloyd (Germany), Institut Certification et Normalisation pour Nautisme (ICNN), HPi Verification Services (HPI) and the International Marine Certificate Institute (IMCI). The failure of two Class 40 keels in last November’s Route du Rhum was the first such incident involving boats certified under the scheme. An investigation by Jean Sans into the reasons for the failure of these two non-standard fins – fabricated from sheet steel and connected by 6mm bolts – will be considered at the next meeting.

The special regulations review investigates loss of life at sea in sailing vessels, to see if our regulations were being used, if they were effective and if the regulations need improving.

Crew training was recognised as a vital aid to survival and adopted into the ORC/ISAF Special Regulations around 2001 with the concept of ISAF National Authority approved training courses, with the aim of providing an internationally accepted Model Training Course in Offshore Personal Survival.

In 2012 the first edition of the ISAF Guide to Offshore Personal Safety was published, written by ISAF in collaboration with Simon Jinks, who among other roles was in charge of the safety training courses for the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race. So far this 170-page book has also been translated into French and Chinese.

Returning to the introduction, for the avoidance of doubt, the use of empty petrol tins is no longer advocated in the OSR as a method for providing buoyancy to a liferaft.
Stan Honey, Will Apold, Simon Forbes

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Talented young Argentinean designer Nicolas Goldenberg has enjoyed great success with his RG 650 Mini 6.50. He is also not afraid to take on the perhaps more challenging subject of the ‘production’ wing sail and its application

We all know the benefits of wings over conventional sails. This now proven technology is commonplace in speed record designs and C-Class catamarans and has become an unchallenged feature of the modern America’s Cup. At the same time we have also learnt how impractical and expensive these systems are for the everyday sailor. However, during the past two years Advanced Wing Systems have quietly been going about an extensive R&D process to bring the advantages of wing sails into a soft or semi-rigid format that can be used on any boat and by any sailor.

Wing sail vs standard rig
Having experienced the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco, we should now need little convincing that wing sails are more efficient than standard sails in terms of performance. This is because they are able to produce more lift with less accompanying drag, the forces being oriented in such a way that they produce more drive force and less heeling force.

The SRW – the first fully functioning semi-rigid wing
Most wing sail attempts have been based on fitting a standard wing onto an existing boat or mimicking what we conventionally think of as a wing.

These attempts have not been particularly successful; mostly they are far from user-friendly, expensive and not suited for everyday boating. The SRW has reinvented the wing concept in a more pragmatic way – light, user-friendly, affordable and applicable to almost any boat.

At Seahorse we bang on endlessly about the cost escalation in small boats and the consequent narrowing of the sport’s appeal as young talent is driven away. Hailing from a sailing dynasty that has contributed a great deal to the sport over the years, David Clark decided to do something about it – and the final result is an inspiration

In many ways we aimed dinghy sailing at the rocks when we discovered carbon fibre. It advanced our optimal performance and it wowed the passerby, but on an economic and cultural level it set us on a track that is lousy for the sport as we know it.

Circa 1970 the difference in weight, stiffness and cost between a simply constructed wood boat vs one with equivalent structure in fibreglass was null. Both were a bit whippy, the weights were roughly equivalent, and the costs were low. The lightest, strongest and fastest boats of the era were C-Class catamarans, built from thin plywood with mindboggling amounts of ring bulkheads and stringers inside. My father has Little America’s Cup winners Patient Lady IV and Patient Lady V hanging in a shed out back and their insides are more cathedral than boat.

Luckily for everybody outside of speedsailing, cutting and fitting that many intricate parts by hand was prohibitively labour intensive, so the number of fleetslaying ‘superboats’ made using this technique was relatively low and thus having one was not necessary. The state of the art was affordable, used boats even more so, and yacht clubs could maintain a strong base of low buy-in young and working class participants. It hit a healthy equilibrium and for a period we achieved a golden age of dinghy sailing.

Enter carbon, the miracle fibre. I’ve grown up working with carbon and the dirty secret is that it’s tremendously simple to use. In dinghies it practically eliminates even thinking about scantlings. Your prototype’s chainplates ripped out? No worries. Bump up the laminate by 300g in the immediate vicinity and forget about it. Bulkheads? OK, maybe we’ll put in one or two but really the foam sandwich skins are so crazily stiff that in most places you barely need them. From a builder’s perspective, especially if you were already laminating with glass, carbon was the ultimate windfall. No labour increase, huge quality increase. Yes, please.

Tom Linskey looks back at his former skipper Dave Ullman’s journey into bigger boats, commerce and coaching…

In the 1980s Dave Ullman continued to campaign the 470 at the highest international level but now he was also moving into his first offshore endeavours – including the Transpac and the Admiral’s Cup. During the same period of transition, computer- aided design was also coming into sailmaking for the first time. Dave had long relied upon his sailmaker’s eye and his feel for boatspeed, along with two-boat testing, to develop fast one-design sails. But the real proof of a fast sail came not from sail testing but from racing.

‘There are limits to two-boat, straightline testing,’ notes Dave. ‘Sail testing is not like sailing in a big fleet, where the water is nearly always quite choppy. And in twoboat testing you can stop and retune when conditions change, but in a race you can’t do that. In a regatta you need sails that go through a big range and are easy to trim, easy to use and that work at, say, 95 per cent efficiency all the time. It doesn’t have to be 100 per cent; you need sails that work when you need to pinch, when you need to go fast-forward, all those things you need to do in a race.

‘Once we’ve done our two-boat sail testing and are pretty happy with a sail, we then race with it to confirm that it is right. Even with computer-aided design, sail designers still need a good eye and knowledge of what makes a boat go to know why something is good and how they can make it better. It isn’t all scientific. There’s still a fair amount of art involved.’

By now Dave’s business was expanding quickly. A widening circle of national and international friends and competitors from a swathe of one-design and offshore pursuits wanted to start Ullman Sails lofts. They’d fly in, stay at Dave’s house for weeks and months, sail-testing during the day, tweaking test sails and cutting new ones at night, endlessly talking sails, rigs, tuning and sailing. What had started as a kind of countercultural band of sailmakers evolved into a nationwide and then global network – today there are 80 Ullman Sails locations, including 31 lofts, covering Europe, Australia, Asia, and the Americas, from Sydney to St Petersburg, Cape Town and Trieste.