Tillerman
Member
We are all mushroom sailors...
That's the most frustrating thing about this whole mess. We never did get enough information to make a good decision on how to vote on the rule change, so those of us who did vote just had to make a guess based on partial knowledge. Some people regretted their vote before voting closed, but it was too late - they couldn't change their votes. Some of you seem to be regretting your vote now based on various random opinions and facts that are trickling out.
Of all the people involved in this, LPE and Global Sailing, as far as I know, never told us anything about their dispute. Why should they? We are only their customers and prospective customers. The people pushing the rule change, Heini and Jeff, fed us a few morsels but by no means enough, and some of what they did tell us seems to have been wrong. Tracy Usher did his best to explain the situation in a number of posts here but even he seemed to be partly in the dark. And Bruce Kirby has gone public a couple of times, but he obviously has an axe to grind and, while I'm predisposed to support his efforts to protect his design rights, I have no real idea whether he is at least partly responsible for causing this mess in the first place.
We were told we had to vote immediately. (Really we didn't.) We were told that patents had expired. (There never were any patents.) The wording of the rule change was altered part way through the voting. The ILCA website only ever carried arguments for one side of the issue. What a way to run an election!
I still have some hope that sharing and discussing what little we do know on forums like this does help a bit in making sense of the situation. But, for now, this mushroom is going sailing.