Back in February this year we had one of those moments that we all would like never to happen, In race 2 of the Twilight Autumn series we had a coming together with Paul William’s Jeanneau 36i “Takana”, while I believed that we were in the right, we ran into a boat that should have stayed clear of us, we tried to avoid them but circumstances were against us. At the time I noted “Subject to Protest – We should be OK – But you never know.” The protest result was that both boats were in the wrong and were to be disqualified.

We appealed that decision with Sailing Australia and I am extremely relived that our appeal has been up held. Unfortunately this still does not take the bad taste away that we did have an incident with another boat and that incident left both boats with some damage. I was never comfortable with the Protest Panel process on this occasion and while I respect that all involved are volunteers giving their time freely I suspect that a better result with far less acrimony could have been reached, interesting that the appeal decision included the sentence “The format of the hearing decision mixed the facts and conclusions.”.

A copy of Sailing Australia’s Appeal Decision is displayed below, it is two pages the pages can be scrolled by clicking on the image and using the up/down arrows at the bottom. The full PDF can be down loaded from G-whizz-vs-Takana-Protest-Appeal.pdf

Also a special thanks to the guys at Sailing Australia who give their time to process these appeals, time that could be better spent in other more productive pursuits if the original protest panels were more considered in their decisions, not to mention we the competitors that should be able to keep out of each other’s way.

G-whizz protest appeal upheld!