Storm in a very big teacup: Why banning autopilots won’t bring the crews back
Morning After - S&S 34 - never took kindly to autopilot - especially downwind!
Before I get into the detail of this current issue, here is my true story to position where I start from and yes I’m conflicted and unsure.
Muckle Flugga, and four people on a small old boat - who didn’t actually need an autopilot!
For eight days of the 2022 Round Britain and Ireland Race we led the fleet overall on corrected time. Four of us aboard Morning After: Louise Clayton, Mike Greville, Fred Neville-Jones and me. A 1968 S&S 34, the first one built, sister ship to Morning Cloud, rebuilt by hand over the previous two winters one during the Covid pandemic. Thirty-four feet of boat, a fleet of considerably larger and considerably newer ones astern of us, and a corrected-time lead that we watched hold day after day with the particular disbelief of people who know exactly how fragile that is.
Then Muckle Flugga. The top of Shetland, the top of the country, and no wind at all. We sat there and watched it go. We won Class 4, which was the right result and a very good one, but we did not win the race overall, which is the part you remember at three in the morning years later.
There were four of us. Under the proposal World Sailing’s Oceanic and Offshore Committee approved on 4 September, four is fully crewed. Three is fully crewed. The same hull, the same sails, the same water, with two aboard instead of four, is not. Had we sailed Morning After two-handed around Britain and Ireland we could have kept the pilot on. With four of us aboard, sharing the watches, standing more rest and arguably sailing the boat more safely, we could not. Mind you autopilots on S&S designs, of the Morning After era, don’t work well downwind and upwind she’ll sail her self if trimmed correctly!
So this is not really an argument about autopilots. It is an argument about where you draw a line, and who is allowed to draw it. And it is the reason I think this row, which will be reported as a squabble about a black box, is actually about something considerably larger.
What was actually decided, when is the final decision - how can we effect it?
The facts first, because most people racing offshore this season still do not know this happened.
1. The rule.RRS 52, Manual Power, in the 2025 to 2028 Racing Rules of Sailing, reads: “A boat’s standing rigging, running rigging, spars and movable hull appendages shall be adjusted and operated only by the power provided by the crew.” Under RRS 86.1, a notice of race may change rule 52. That is not a loophole. It is how the rule is designed, and it is why the Rolex Fastnet Race notice of race carries, at clause 2.12, the words “Automatic and wind-vane devices for steering are permitted (this changes RRS 52 and amends IRC Rule 15).” Fleet-wide. Not a double-handed carve-out.
2. The decision. On 4 September, by electronic ballot, the Oceanic and Offshore Committee approved a new Oceanic and Offshore Code as three linked proposals. The centrepiece, named “Human Endeavor”, would stop an organising authority modifying Rule 52 for boats with three or more crew, which in practice bars autopilots for fully crewed boats in every Category 0 to Category 4 race in the world, and in races run under equivalents such as the US Sailing Safety Equipment Requirements. It also recommends that boats racing under the standard rule be scored separately from boats racing under any other version of it.
3. The second proposal. A propulsion restriction added to Rule 42. Worth understanding why that is heavier than it looks: a notice of race may change Rule 52, but it may not change Rule 42, which sits on the restricted list at RRS 86.1(a). Move a question from 52 to 42 and you have moved it out of the organiser’s reach entirely.
4. The third proposal. It writes the Code into the committee’s own terms of reference, giving it standing authority to amend rule-status material outside the process the Racing Rules Committee runs. This one has had the least attention and it is the one that will still matter in ten years.
5. The vote. By RORC’s account, which RORC asks be treated as provisional, nine of eighteen members took part, seven in favour and two abstaining. RORC’s stated reasons for the caveat are worth repeating: the meeting was hard to follow, it was not always clear who was a voting member, and the electronic results were not visible to observers. Official minutes are due on 18 September. If they differ, I will correct this piece and say so.
6. The timetable. Papers publish in October. The proposals go to the World Sailing Annual Conference in Qingdao, 16 to 21 November. A committee vote is a recommendation, not a decision. Council decides submissions, and Council members are elected by the member national authorities.
The case put properly -it’s complicated, maybe?
Rule 52 is not fussiness. It states a principle: the boat is worked by the people aboard her. Strip that out and you are no longer measuring the same thing. Every sport that has let a machine take over a core physical act has had to decide, eventually, whether it is still the same sport, and the honest answer is usually no.
And the results are not noise. At the 2025 Rolex Fastnet Race the entire IRC overall podium was double-handed, in three different designs: Léon, the JPK 1050 of Jean-Pierre Kelbert and Alexis Loison, winning by nearly two hours in the boat’s fourth race; Lann Ael 3 with Didier Gaudoux and Erwan Tabarly; Amarris with Tanguy Bouroullec and Achille Nebout. At the 80th Rolex Sydney Hobart the Tattersall Cup went to Min River, sailed two-handed by Jiang Lin and Alexis Loison, the first woman to win the race and the first double-handed crew to take the trophy. Scuttlebutt reports that seven of the top ten overall in that race were double-handed teams using pilots, on boats between 32 and 35 feet. Either way, Loison sailed on the boat that won the Fastnet overall and the boat that won the Hobart overall in the same year. Two hemispheres, two Rolex races, one double-handed sailor.
If a rating rule cannot price a technology, the results will eventually be decided by who has it. That is a real problem and pretending otherwise is just avoiding the unexpected consequences.
There is a structural case too. One rule with two versions inside one fleet is incoherent, and writing global rules is what a global federation is for. And there is the awkward fact that the recommendation of separate scoring is, on its face, precisely what I argued for in August in “Offshore racing is now two sports”.
So let me deal with that properly.
The honest counterweight
If I say offshore racing has become two sports, I have handed the governing body the premise it needs to treat them as two sports, including by rule. That is a fair charge and I accept it.
The distinction, and it is the whole argument, is intent.
Separation designed as an incentive adds boats. Give double-handed racing its own championship, its own overall, its own trophy and its own rating treatment, and you have created a place for a class of owner who would otherwise not start. Roughly a quarter of the record IRC Fastnet fleet now races double-handed. The IRC Two-Handed class began in 2005 with just twenty boats.
Separation designed as a penalty removes boats. Score a fleet apart in order to quarantine a technology and you have not created a discipline, you have created a naughty step. The owners concerned will read it correctly within about a week, and a proportion of them will simply not enter.
Same mechanism. Opposite direction. The results sheet cannot tell you which one you are doing. Only the reason can, and the reason is decided by the question you asked at the start.
Where the case fails, and it is not on autopilots
World Sailing’s own Oceanic and Offshore Committee Work Plan for 2026 carries, under Objective 2, Technology, this task: “Collect information from OA’s and Classes on the current approaches to regulating technology”. The deadline is the Annual Conference. Under Objective 3 the committee undertook to “Hold an online meeting with the wider community to establish connections with the wider offshore community”, again by the Annual Conference.
The committee voted before doing either.
That is not a matter of opinion about pilots. It is the committee’s own published workplan, and the information it required is not in dispute and would have been informative. Organising authorities already answer this question, and they do not answer it the same way, because their fleets are not the same. RORC permits self-steering across all its races. The Pacific Cup permits it for all entries. Chicago and Bayview Mackinac permit it in their cruising divisions with a four-crew minimum. Marion Bermuda permits it in the Founders Division with a minimum of five. Trans Superior in its cruising division with a minimum of three. The Newport Bermuda Race permits it in the Finisterre Division and applies Rule 52 in full to the St David’s Lighthouse Division: one organising authority, two deliberate answers for two of its own fleets.
Not one of those is a double-handed carve-out. Most were written to keep crews on the water who would otherwise have stayed at home.
At least eleven organisations across four countries asked for consultation before the vote. The UK Doublehanded Offshore Series objected on 27 August with race-day data. RORC and CYCA wrote jointly on 28 August asking for “a formal and properly representative consultation”, on the reasoning that “Organizing Authorities are best placed to understand these local circumstances and the needs of their competitors.” Storm Trysail asked on 2 September. Then NYYC, Chicago Yacht Club, Pacific Cup Yacht Club, the Noordzee Club, the Ocean Racing Club of Victoria and others.
Andrew Weiss, Commodore of the Storm Trysail Club, put the position in one sentence that I suspect is the truest thing written about this so far: “I believe most of the US sailors and organizers affected by this committee decision do not yet know it happened.”
He is right, and it is not only the Americans.
Note what nobody is asking for. Nobody in that group argues autopilots must be permitted everywhere. Nobody argues they should be banned. Several of the same clubs accept the substance of the Rule 42 propulsion proposal and object only to its drafting and its venue, which ought to dispose of any suggestion that this is reflexive hostility to regulation.
Is there a right question?
The question the committee asked was: should fully crewed boats be allowed autopilots?
The question in front of the sport is: how do we get more boats to more start lines, across two disciplines that have genuinely diverged, each of them safe and each of them rated and scored on its own terms?
Answer the second and the first mostly answers itself. Four things follow.
Rate it, do not ban it. IRC already rates sails, appendages, propellers and a great deal else. A pilot is a rating problem before it is a prohibition problem, and a rating answer keeps boats racing while a prohibition answer sends them home. I have written before that the rating is rarely your real problem, and that holds here too: the rule is not the enemy, the refusal to use it is.
Score the disciplines separately, as a prize rather than a punishment. Own championship, own overall, own silver. That is worth doing on its merits and it is worth doing now.
Leave Rule 52 with the organising authority, and standardise the declaration instead. If World Sailing wants coherence, require every notice of race to state its Rule 52 position in a common form, publish the lot, and you have the dataset the workplan asked for. Then have the argument, with evidence, at a conference where the people affected are in the room.
Say the real cost out loud. There is one, and it is not fairness. If the pilot replaces the sixth and seventh crew, the offshore training berth goes with it, and that berth is where the next generation of navigators and watch leaders is made. I wrote in August about who pays for the pathway. That is a serious argument for funding it deliberately. It is not an argument for banning a box, because banning the box does not put a nineteen-year-old on the rail. Money and intent do.
The timing is tight
Papers publish in October. Qingdao is 16 to 21 November. Council decides, and Council members are elected by the member national authorities, which in this country means the RYA.
If you run a race, sit on a committee, or simply care how this lands, the useful act between now and October is narrow and specific: ask your national authority what instruction its Council representatives will carry to Qingdao, and ask it in writing.
This will be reported as a storm in a teacup. It is not. The teacup is the autopilot. The storm is whether the people who run the races still get to decide how they are run, and whether anyone at the top of this sport is asking the only question that matters, which is how we get more boats out there at all.
Preparation. Decisions. Execution.
Stuart Greenfield FirstShift — Yacht Racing Intelligence From first shift to first place.
Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.
It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.
That is where races are won and lost.
At FirstShift, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.
Thanks for reading Firstshift - yacht racing intelligence!
This post is public so feel free to share it.
Comments