New class rules published for OK Dinghy class

by Robert Deaves on 7 May 2017 Following two years exhaustive work the OK Dinghy class is pleased to announce a new version of its Class Rules has finally been published, converting the original, and somewhat dated, wordings into an ERS (Equipment Rules of Sailing) compliant SCR (Standard Class Rules) format.

The new Class Rules were published on the World Sailing website last week and will become effective on June 1, 2017, to coincide with the end of the 2017 OK Dinghy World Championship in Barbados.

The conversion is a genuine reflection of how the class has modernised itself over the past five to ten years with state of the art equipment and new builders producing high quality and beautiful looking boats. The class celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, so this is a fitting time to bring the Class Rules up to date to reflect modern thinking.

The work has largely been carried out by the Chairman of the OKDIA Technical Committee, Alistair Deaves. A first draft of the conversion came from Dave Chivers of the UK, but then assistance came from all around the world both from the OK Dinghy class and outside. Along the way, Finn Gheury has provided the new diagrams while the hardworking World Sailing technical specialist Javier Blanco has added enormous effort to see the project through to its conclusion, ably helped by his colleagues Norbert Marin and Rob Taylor.

The SCR format provides a standard system of organising the rules that distinguishes between the authorities, sailors and builders responsibilities. In going through this process many of the inconsistencies within the rules have been removed and hopefully items that could be misinterpreted have been clarified.

Deaves commented, “It has been a mammoth task to rewrite the rules, get them in the correct order and section and de-bug all the resulting errors and changes. But the time has come to put them to the test and see what happens. For those of us working on them we feel that the best way to get rid of any remaining issues is to get them published and used.”

“The AGM in France last year gave the Technical Committee the authority to tidy up the then draft and try and get it published by the end of the year. The final push was harder than we imagined and it has taken a few months more to polish it up to how it now reads. This is the end of a very long project that started in 2015.”

“Unfortunately much of the transfer of information over the last 20 months, indeed the last eight years, between World Sailing and OKDIA is about to be lost. As World Sailing goes through its move of offices to London there are some majors changes of staff taking place and the class will lose its valuable contacts there, who have been so useful and helpful.”

The new Class Rules can be seen here

A new measurement form, in line with the new rules, has also been produced and can be found here

The class would like to thank to everyone who helped see this project through to completion. It has been a huge task.