Thank you all for participating in the recent vote on the proposed rule changes. Yesterday we had a Fireball Executive meeting where we considered the results. They can be found here.

After weighting each vote by the NCA's size in accordance with the FI Constitution, the proposals were agreed by the majority, with the minimum vote being 71% in favour. Since this exceeds the minimum threshold set out in the constitution of 60%, all proposals were considered passed.

I would like to thank the Chair of the FI Technical Committee, Dave Hall, who has invested a huge amount of effort communicating these changes, starting 15 months ago at the Europeans in Portoroz, where he flew out specially just to present the ideas at the class open forum.

There was clearly a lot of debate about the changes, and the executive read all the comments and appreciated all the concerns raised. So, whilst the changes have been approved, Dave will be aiming to address many of these concerns when formulating the precise wording of the new rules to ensure that they cannot be exploited and the Fireball remains the safe, affordable and competitive class that we all know and love.

As to the way forward, the existing rules first have to be reformatted so they abide by World Sailing standards and are a consistent set of “closed rules”. Since this is just a reformatting which will have been approved by the technical committee and the International Measurer, I suggest that it be handled as a dialogue between measurers rather than between sailors. If you have suitable qualified people who would like to review the new rules before, please contact Dave Hall as soon as possible.

However, even though World Sailing has imposed these changes on us, the changes will require another vote to satisfy the FI constitution. This vote will be circulated at the end of the year or early in the New Year. After this vote has been completed, we will submit the "closed rule" reformatting changes to World Sailing, hopefully before the end of January

Whilst World Sailing is approving these reformatted rules, we will make the changes that have just been voted on so they can be submitted immediately after the first changes are approved.

Dave is working closely with World Sailing to ensure this whole process runs smoothly.

I hope this is all clear. Have a great festive season and happy Fireballing,

Kind regards,

Nick Rees

Commodore

Fireball International