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Draft Minutes of Annual General Meeting 2009
29th July 2009 at Sonderborg, Denmark
Meeting started at 2012hrs and ended at 2223 hrs
The meeting was opened by chairman Neil Smith.
Apologies from: Gil Woolley
Ben Holden commented that the Agenda for the meeting should have been posted prior to the Meeting
Neil Smith ran through the Agenda and introduced himself, Jan, Marco, Chris and Jens.
Matter Arising from previous AGM:
Jan Von der Bank apologised for not having got round to re writing the class rules and said they would be rewritten by the next AGM.
Chairman's report - Neil Smith
Neil thanked everyone for coming and thanked the Danish Team at the Yacht Club and the Race committee for organising the event with special thanks to Flemming.
He went on to thank the national representatives for helping the class to grow , especially Germany which now has a larger contender class than lasers. He also thanked the sailmakers, boatbuilders and other people connected with the class for their work in keeping the class going.
He mentioned the challenges faced over the past year, in finding a new class secretary, a new international measurer in which we have Andrew Davies, a new content and web manager for the website who is now Jan and Nikky and praised them for the production of the web page, links and frontage and asked if anyone had any content they wished to be published this could be sent to himself for forwarding.
He mentioned about raising the profile of the class by advertising on line with Sailing Anarchy and if there were any other prospective websites which would be good for the class then contact the ICA committee and it may be able to help fund this.
He mentioned the 2008 worlds in North America and how this was helping to gain momentum for the class with 7 boats in the last 2 years.
Plans for the forthcoming year were to increase advertising and web presence and the introduction of a YouTube competition with a prize.
He also suggested that the National Associations could learn from the growing countries and should pass on what they’ve been doing to other NAs.
He suggested that we should get greater ISAF coverage and although there is a strong European presence and growth in North America we should continue to grow and promote the class.
He asked the National Associations that if they were planning on doing anything they should involve the committee early and seek approval before spending anything.
He finished with asking for any new or unique ideas to promote the class and if anyone had any thoughts on how we can promote the class better to contact him directly.
Treasurer's report - Jens Langendorf
All fees are now in for 2008, but still awaiting some fees for 2009, despite this there is almost 19,000 euros in the bank, which is 3k less than last year.
The worlds video had cost 2k and the money which had been lent to Canada had now been returned and once this has cleared we will have broken even.
There has been a growth in paying members although CAN, USA, ITA, BEL, EST and FIN were still unpaid which has resulted in overall growth.
JVdB proposed that we didn’t charge countries with small memberships
Soren proposed all pay but the ICA fund them
There was then a discussion about the criteria for a small membership i.e. number of members
JVdB then clarified that we needed to be see the monetary transactions
Neil said that we’d been down the not paying route before and that hadn’t been successful/
Soren suggested that in that case a bill to the value of the subscriptions to the ICA would suffice and all agreed, Jens therefore plans to take a relaxed approach to the smaller countries.
Back to the treasurers report, AUS had been leant money to build a mold and the monies were being returned as aboats were built.
Technical Report - Marco Versari
Marco started that he was trying to do the technical chairmans role however as mentioned in the presidents report the role here was also not clearly defined. He has however in conjunction with Gregg Barrington been going over the class rules. He stated that our class rules should meet the ISAF international class rules template and suggested that this was perhaps what the technical chairman should do. Some things in the current rules are unclear and misleading and he alluded that there were some new and interesting things as highlighted below.
Marco spoke about the templates in the USA and getting these digitised and CNC’d which would need to be checked at the AGM? He also mentioned chocks for the rudder fittings currently being illegal and that a maximum pivot point aft could be a solution and would also cover the skin projection issue.
He spoke of the ERS and how there is no longer a description of headboard in them yet these are described in the contender rules.
He also spoke about chines and how having checked boats from all manufacturers he had come up with a minimum radius of 35mm .
He discussed batten spacing and how the leech should be divided equally however with the shorter leech lengths this was no longer plausible so we need to change the wording and this would need to go through the AGM.
The tip weight was discussed and although the change had gone to ISAF we did not know currently what had happened with the rule changes.
Marco proposed that he and GB should re write the class rules using the ISAF template to bring us in line with ISAF. Moll mentioned that this was started 3 years ago by ISAF and the Contender class was to be the model class, however the contact who was working on it at ISAF left and this was never picked up again by his successor.
Marco made a point of stating that the rules would not be changed but just rewritten to fall in line with ISAF requirements and that he and GB would do it afresh and if there were any changes these would be brought up at the next AGM.
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