Amendments 1 and 2 to the Special Regulations have issued addressing mandatory reporting of incidents and codeine.

The first of the two, Amendment 1 introduces a rule requiring safety incidents to be reported to Australian Sailing in accordance with the Guidelines for Incident Reporting set out by World Sailing at https://www.sailing.org/documents/offshorespecialregs

Whist there has been considerable variation in the way offshore sailing incidents are reviewed and reported, in Australia many clubs already perform these reviews voluntarily. These sailing incident reviews that have been done always highlighted valuable lessons.

As the national and international governing bodies for sailing it is appropriate for Australian Sailing and World Sailing to ensure that reviews of significant incidents and boat or equipment failures are conducted and that lessons learned are available to the sailing community.

The second, Amendment 2 removes low dose Codeine from the medical kit requirements for Category 1 to 3 races. The amendment is necessitated by changes made by the Therapeutic Goods Administration of the Australian Government’s Department of Health. The amendments have been published at https://www.sailingresources.org.au/safety/specialregs/. The Special Regulations published on the same page have also been updated to include the amendments.

For more information contact Glen Stanaway at glen.stanaway@sailing.org.au or by phoning 0417 446 727.