A look forward to 2026 our IACA President Bailey White.
Dear A-Class Sailors,
Happy 2026 to you and welcome to our class’s 70th anniversary. With speeds up to 34+ knots these days, she is quick for a 70 year old!
I’ve just recently returned from New Zealand where all of the sailors agreed we were treated as family. The hosts did so many things to make us and those who traveled with us welcome. We started with a Māori ceremony for us all. Each day we enjoyed New Zealand pies and flat whites for breakfast and lunch right by the rigging area. We had live streaming of both courses and a big screen display of the racing inside the clubhouse, with top edits shown each evening. We had PredictWind providing access to its great data services for all sailors and helping operate and maintain its markbots for two courses. We even had a fully rigged A-cat in the nearby mall and the whole community coming by for a concert and food trucks. The list goes and on and highlights how much work goes into any of our World Championships. I think you will be pleased we as a class were able to thank all the volunteers with a gift of 36 bottles of wine and prosecco during the Awards.
We are starting 2026 with “a lot on” as the Kiwis say. I want to describe five things IACA is working on for you:
1) We have warm water venues for both our European and World Championships. Both websites are up, so start your planning. Going to a championship is a lifetime memory. Make sure you race one in 2026.
Spanish Europeans: https://fvrm.sailti.com/es/default/races/race/text/campeonato-europa-clase-a-es
American Worlds: https://www.aclassworlds.com
Several countries have discussed hosting the Worlds in Europe in 2027 and 2028. Australia will host us in 2029. Stay tuned and if you want to bid to host in the next few years, now is the time to let me know
2) Both Championship events will trial two new techniques to improve our championships. The first is trialing a Windward Gate for both our fleets. This concept broadens the strategic and tactical options available to all sailors and reduces the historic overstanding at the windward mark in big fleets. The windward gate will be familiar to anyone who watches SailGP or the Americas Cup.
Our other trial is the Early Finish that lets the slower Open boats finish on the 2nd lap. This takes some planning, but is really innovative for us. We have all seen the uber foilers who can fly in almost any wind and pass the mere mortals. For the Early Finish, boats completing the third lap will not sail through the leeward gate. Once the first finishes, boats still on the 2nd lap will finish like a shortened course at the leeward gate. This change should benefit the whole fleet, shortening the wait times for the fastest sailors and helping the slower sailors sail a more similar total racing time. While it creates a new requirement for the Race Committee to execute, it also shortens the race duration and gives more flexibility to the overall regatta management. It is not easy to get all the races in as we all know.
We will vote on keeping these, removing them, or changing them after the trial. If nothing is proposed, they will sunset and we will go back to normal. The trial is part of our democratic process and highlights how careful our constitution is when it comes to change. To put any change into our championship rules for 2027 and beyond, we will need a country to make a proposal and be seconded by two countries. We will then need two thirds of country votes to approve the proposal at the World General Meeting or a called extraordinary WGM.
3) We are gearing up for more class promotion. Lamberto Cesari has volunteered to serve as our Marketing Director and I think this is one of the best things to come out of the 2025 WGM. Lamberto is a force for good in the class, traveling to more continents than any other member I know and bringing a great spirit to his digital communications. Stay tuned as this area develops and please reach out to Lamberto with any ideas. This is a very important endeavor, one that I think is probably the most important out of all that is happening.
4) We are seeing the class is resilient over and over again. We live in a time of tremendous change as we all know. What seemed like futuristic fiction just a few years ago becomes reality in many parts of our lives. Sometimes even a bad dream becomes real these days.
If you look at the A Class over the last 10 years, the class has navigated foiling, GPS, the creation of classics, and more. Because of how well we have managed as a whole, we had our largest Worlds ever in 2024. Sure, there are always ways to improve and nothing is perfect, but overall the class is working, improving each year thanks to our manufacturers, sailors, and association. Just sail a modern boat or look at how the boats performed in NZ in high winds compared to the Islamorada Worlds in USA more than a decade ago. Our boats are faster, stronger, and more controlled AND we are bucking the negative trend in sailboat racing as a whole.
With all of this progression, somehow we are still enjoying a sense of stability and great racing. Proposals to adjust the class rules are typically failing at WGMs. Most World Champions are being decided on the last day (though Jacek certainly set the bar at a new level in 2025). Sailors are developing their boats over several years and changing platforms when they are ready as opposed to every year.
These are really good things and all of the work listed in items one to three above work to capitalize on these good things and grow the class.
5) With all this said, any successful business takes a small portion of its resources and devotes them to Research & Development to plan for the future. R&D can be exploratory. For us, it could result in reinforcement we are still on the right path or it could bring light to potential changes that would benefit our ecosystem of sailors and manufacturers. We are a member organization and not a business, so the X Boat Challenge is a way to encourage that R&D over several years but not mandate it. I can’t emphasize enough this should be a long term learning process. Our class constitution is conservative for our class rules even more than our championship rules. It requires the same proposal process and two thirds country vote but also, if the country vote is affirmative, two thirds of individual sailor votes. It is hard to change and that has proven to be a good thing since 1956 when the A Division Catamaran was first defined. You are in control of the class.
Let’s thank all those who have gone before us and prepare the way for those who will follow by making 2026 a great year for the International A-Class Catamaran.
Best,
Bailey
