JonRowe

No idea, but spinning that point on its head, has there ever been members of a club fighting the team?

I agree that "not able to" and "not willing to risk" are different, but the current agreement means they are not funding ETNZ, if ETNZ say "we can't compete at home" and RNZYS are forced by the membership to terminate the agreement, if thats even legally possible, then RNZYS would have to foot the bill for building or buying an AC72 and hosting a defence. Its entirely possible they would forfeit in that scenario.

However the court of jurisdiction for the deed is the NYSC, so someone could still go to the NYSC to throw out the protocol based on the deed. So I believe it goes back to the question of wether a break down under arbitration is "grounds" to go to the NYSC. It would be messy either way as you could presumedly still go to the NZ courts for damgages?

I'm working off the premise that the Deed controls the cup and permits parts of the competition to be agreed by mutual consent. Thus the deed permits the protocol to run the cup. So if they go through the protocols arbitration procedures as required by that contract, but still can't come to an agreement, I don't see how that doesn't open up either party going to the NYSC and demonstrating that there is no mutual consent and getting the procotol thrown out. I don't see how that any different from the oracle / alinghi court case. Of course it requires one side or the other (presumedly the c

There are, but they are not infinite, if at some point if it all breaks down it my understanding is it goes back to the DoG. We were talking extremes here, as I don't think RNZYS will force ETNZ out, I think they will say to the members "we hear you but we have contracts in place". I also note that the protocol does not have a mechanism for a dispute between RNZYS and ETNZ, so that would presumedly just go straight to a NZ court.

I'm sure the more legally inclined will correct me on this, but the protocol is only binding whilst there is mutual consent, if the members vote to force RNZYS Inc to hold the cup in Auckland and TNZ Ltd declines, then RNZYS Inc is forced to negotiate with the challenger of record, if Athena Racing Limited (competing as INEOS BRitannia) / RYS Ltd then decline it becomes a deed of gift match. So RNZYS Inc would then have to build a boat to compete under the deed of gift rules or hand the cup over. Of course in reality, there will just be a lot of legal battles which I'm sure will only

Your mistake is assuming there were adults involved.

It was a slippery slope of general disagreements over things like which ACWS events got cancelled, wind limits, who paid for the prada cup, who got to run media, why didn't they invite Ben Ainsley to a presso, why did they hire the anti-christ I mean Brad Butterworth... etc...

Forgive my ignorance here Porthos, but why isn't it a contract issue? If a new cup holder decided to ignore the agreement they made for AC37 when holding AC38, its not an issue with the deed which permits them to change the boat, but an issue with the entry agreement they made for AC37. From my naive viewpoint that's just a contract they made with ETNZ/RNZYS?

Have they put out a statement blaming the OD mast? Or even had time to do a post mortem to work out what failed? If they are unhappy I'm sure they will talk with the rest of the IMOCA skippers and push for changes, the OD mast is not some edict handed down from on high, its a decision the skippers came to themselves and as such is something they can all vote to change... IMOCAs are high performance race boats and something will always break if you push hard enough, its part of the skillset of the skippers to manage the loading on their boats vs the tolerances they've been built to. I

The IMOCA class is skipper led, and so far they've talked about reducing the scope of the foils rather than changing the OD mast, that may change, but currently the skippers seem happy with the OD mast.

You are free to design the foils so you don't break the mast. The sailors have chosen to design foils which generate righting moment such that they can power the rig beyond its known breaking tolerances. This is why the one design mast and keel was introduced in the first place, because the sailors and engineers were designing boats that failed. I'd argue perhaps the one design mast could become a "minimum" spec, with a strict testing regime instead, but its not that much different from other parts of the rule, which after all restricts plenty of things and only recently allowed foils at all,

Thats one way of spinning it... The other is that foils are causing increased risk by putting the boats under more load, which was acknowledged by the class and is why the next rule is limiting the foils to reduce that risk.

You can see the keel is not connected, its currently up through the centre of the boat, which is likely a later modification to allow it to be trailerable without being high up, non of the current protos have that feature, they take the keel off entirely if they want to trailer "low rider" style.

+1 YB tracks are notoriously unreliable for judging wether a boat cleared or entered a TSS