Bit hacked off actually, as my good lady carefully removed the sticker required to be fitted on the hull at the Inlands and paint damage has ensued. Should I address a claim to the MROA? I am sure JT will have a field day!

In all seriousness, I hereby refuse to fit any hull stickers provided by organising authorities. Please disqualify me from any events for which this is a requirement in the sailing instructions (or I will simply not attend if I am aware of the requirement). I have enough planned over the winter on BAU without having to repaint the topsides.

Please consider those with non-plastic hulls.

Rant over.

In all seriousness if you are not prepared to obey the rules than I don't want to sail against you.  I have a wooden boat too.  You cannot pick and choose the rules which you want to adhere to.

You should not address a claim to the MROA.  ISAF rules require you to give up a portion of your boat to a sponsor.  If you don't like that buy some golf clubs!

Rant over!

whoa chaps!!!!!...ive been waiting for this to happen...some of these adhesives on these stickers are quite powerful...my answer...and it works...leave the backing on and use insulation tape  on the edges..we all know how much effort andy puts in to field a tidy boat...id be pretty narked too!!and I hate painting boats!!!!!!

Least you get paid to do it .....

Funnily enough, Chris M thought that it wouldn't stick ... if only I could get some bog to stick as well.

I have to say I would not be happy sticking adverts on rong numbers paint work, it would be cheaper to pay my portion of the sponsorship than pay for a new can of paint to match the current coat. And definitely less hassle than having to explain the damage to the merlin preservation police that stalk the old wooden boats! Sponsorship is there to make our sailing cheaper surely???? I'd sail against you any day Andy! probably wouldn't win looking at your last performance :)

Quite happy to support our much needed sponsors and our struggling boat repair industry - I just can't run to a £600 paint job every season and rather upset that the £600 spent on the last paint job is now ruined. Would be even more hacked off if it was a £3K jobbie from Paintcraft. Rather spend the money on a new jib & kite ....

I suppose that this is a decent set of golf bats which wouldn't get ruined by a little label .... one more class member out of the fleet?

due to adverse weather conditions the stickers would not stick to the main sails. So they were applied to the hulls nobody said you had to use the adhesive stickers, insulation tape would of sufficed. seems like another rule change will be replied so Andy can paint his boat.

applied *

It may be worth the MROA to ask the company who supply the stickers to use a removable adhesive sticker material. It's less aggressive than a permanent adhesive. Always the easiest way to remove any sticker is to apply some heat, particularly on a cold day (a hair dryer is fine) before removing. This softens the vinyl/adhesive and the sticker can be removed without taking the paint/varnish off. Hopefully this may help for the future. I run a sign business by the way ;-)

Ben, don't want a rule change, I'll just turn round and drive home. You can then put whatever you want on your boats. Instructions were not given to me when I was handed the label.  Get given self adhesive label so first though is to tape it on? Note to self there I guess. Didn't have the same problem with vinyl (float on type) lettering on paint.

Maybe time to just jack it in and go and do something else as John M suggested. The missus would be happier without the boat fund expenses. Have fun y'all.

I think we need a better idea than stickers, our experience this year has been particularly bad. This is mainly maybe due to weather and lack of somewhere dry and availability of cleaning products but a lot of rooster stickers had come off by the Wednesday of the champs and the nautilus stickers wouldn't stick to my sails or hull (Waxed).

I don't think stickers on a hull are a good idea for us because we have a number of wooden boats and paint can be delicate, and also we have a clinker hull and its incredibly difficult to get them to go around the lands.

I mentioned this at the meeting tonight and we are going to look at it. Personally I have every sympathy for Andy and I hope we can all agree that we won't be asking wooden boats to apply stickers to their hulls again. We didn't have problems with the Allen or Selden stickers on sails so hopefully if we are to continue using stickers on sails we can get around the problems by means of finding time and somewhere to put them on - it is more reasonable to expect this for a week event than it is two days.

Equally we must also be mindful that our sponsors will expect value for their contribution, so a compromise is needed. Basically we are aware of the problems and are looking for a solution.

Has anyone actually asked the sponsors what and where they want advertising, and are they aware of the problem? I suspect not.  Perhaps danbuoys with whip and banners as marks would be a better advertising hoarding.

Thanks Chris. Now that I have slept and calmed down a bit, I think that there are two issues at stake here

1. The event organisers have to realise that they have a duty of care to provide advertising that does not damage the boat / sails / sailors, and provide detailed instructions for application or removal. After all, would this even be a discussion point if the advertising provided was a hard plastic that had to be screwed on? I will be clarifying this with the RYA Technical team later and what rights a sailor / boat owner has. Unless I have confidence that the required advertising will not result in damage, I will not put it on. End of story. An apology or acknowledgement of this would be good, not an insinuation that I need a Rule Change, Ben.
2. A realisation that since there was no obvious photographers at Grafham (there were no photos on the race report that I saw), I am left wondering why there was advertising on the boats at all. Grafham (unlike San Fran, or Plymouth Hoe) is not a spectators venue, so what point was the hull sticker trying to achieve? Surely, serious thought should go into the returns that the sponsors are looking for and I am glad that you alluded to this, Chris.

Just to clarify, I have taken my boat to a number of events that required hull stickers. This was the first to result in paint damage, so that highlights that it was this event's stickers, not my paint or application.

The trick with these sponsors stickes (learnt the hard way back when my children sailed wooden Cadets) is to make sure you polish the hull where the sticker will go before applying it then warm the sticker by careful use of a hair-dryer or hot water when you come to take it off. Having said that the sticker came off my wooden boat Ok (unlike the Salcombe harbour one!)

That's the trouble with stickers; either they wash off halfway through the week, or they stick like s**t to a blanket and need the nuclear option to remove them. I haven't had the joy of trying to get them off a painted surface, but removing them from a plastic FD hull was less than joyful. I ended up 'shaving' them off in strips with a Stanley blade...

I can quite see where Andy's coming from, and the point about clinker or pseudo-clinker hulls is a valid one. Surely the obvious answer is to restrict sponsorship stickers to sails if they want big ones - or produce them in a size and shape that will fit onto a boom? 	

I have had a further discussion with the RYA Technical team and some interesting opinions were expressed:

1. The ISAF advertising code does not allow advertising on sails ... 
2. The RYA opinion (which I disagree with) is that applying the advertising is at the competitor's risk
3. There is nothing in the Rules that places an obligation to think sensibly on the Organising Authority, so they could pitch up with a hard plastic advertising and instruct the competitors to screw on the advertising. Obviously an unlikely and extreme case, but not prohibited, and I expect that they would either have a zero race entry or a very interesting race briefing!
4. A competitor can write to the Race Committee requesting that they be allowed to either not display the advertising or place it in an alternative position. There are allowances for ethical, moral or religious objections in the Rules. Not sure about "it will damage my boat" being a moral objection, but I will try it next time! 

So, I am going to go to events with a letter asking to be excused from advertising on hulls. I'll report back if this is accepted by race committees.

Of course, the Race Committee is not obliged to accept the letter - I might stick a copy on email to the organising sailing club in the week(s) before an open meeting so that I do not waste my time and money travelling to an event with hull advertising and no alternatives on offer.

I think you should defiantly take up golf!!
Anyone who has this much time on there hands to moan about a sticker is clearly in need of another hobbie to keep occupied.
Writing your letter is s good idea I hope they turn you away as the class needs to support there sponsors in anyway they can not sure the sponsors appreciate their  good will been slated on a public forum following their event.
Go play golf think they give out score cards rather than stickers !!!

In another life I came across a 'thingy' that could fix this problem.  You can get two very thin/light strips of highly magnetic flat sheet and they will 'stick' to each other through a wood/grp hull and you can then stick your sticker on them.

What do we actually get from these sponsors?
Sometimes it seems the only beneficiaries are the sticker manufacturers.

Dear Mr Sticker Man.

Maybe I do have too much time on my hands, but maybe I am still aggrieved that a £600 paint job has been ruined. The reason for publishing this on the MR Forum is to encourage debate and discussion about how to apply hull stickers, how to remove them and what options there are if you (for whatever reasons) don't want to fit them. Some of the correspondents on this thread have made very helpful suggestions that I would have loved to have known about a week ago, so this open discussion is useful, and I make no apology for starting it.

I have a friend whom has just spent nigh on £2K on a paint job. Do you think that they are going to be encouraged to attend any event that requires something being stuck on their boat?

Of course, you are completely correct that I could sell up and either buy an FRP boat or find another sport. Believe me that this has been a very serious option this week, but one of the great things about the Merlin Rocket is that you can sail great works of wood. BAU is one of them and I take immense pride that she is widely regarded as one of the prettiest boats on the circuit. I'd like to keep her this way, but I'd also like to be sailing her, not spending more time in the garage.

Interestingly, as a result of this query with the RYA they have invited me to join their Technical Committee. So, maybe some people think that there is a valid point here, even if you do not.

Kind regards

Andy Hay
MR 3626 Business as Usual

Mr Sticker Man, I know who you are. It's not difficult at all to find out who pseudonyms belong to and you might want to bear that in mind. You've had your say under your own name, I suggest you leave it at that.

We do actually get quite a lot from sponsorship, if we didn't we wouldn't bother!

They put cash in which is used to pay for prizes, bands, and general social stuff at the event in question. Without it we'd obviously have to fund that ourselves with an obvious knock on effect.

Or even perish the thought get people to pay the going rate for social activities. It is after all a sailing event!

Thanks Chris.

For the record, and you'll notice in the original posts, that I have never been critical of any sponsors. I believe that they would be aghast at any suggestion or implication here. I am trying to establish whether the Organising Authority has any responsibility with advertising materials and what a sailor can do to alleviate possible damage to their boat.

As mentioned before, what to our much needed sponsors get out of having a label applied to a hull when there were no on-water photographers and the only people whom would notice this were the sailors themselves? A leaflet in the entry pack would have had equal recognition from the sailors, if this was the sole target audience.

I know that the MROA are considering this and I look forward to hearing about their deliberations.

In considering the value of sponsors, remember that you pay for it somewhere along the line as very few sponsors do it for no reason; it's business decision and they recoup the costs through prices or increased sales, so the punter ends up paying somewhere along the line, it is just that the costs become less visible in the production and consumption chain.  Would it be better to just put the real costs on entry?  probably not because the sponsorship means the costs are spread over all the sponsors customers rather than just the entrants to the event so the price to the event entrant is much lower; whether that is equitable or not is another matter.

Sticker / Labels can come with differnet types of adhesives:

1. Permanent - The glue will set fairly raipdly after application and will be difficult to remove often needing a solvent.
2.Semi-permanent - The glue sets within a few days but can be re-positioned up until then when it becomes permanent.
3. Removable self adhesive - The glue never sets and can be removed with a simple pull. This glue is designed so that even a paper label can be removed with no tears and leaves no residue on the surface.

It sounds like the stickers used were wrongly specified

There are some other glue types that I seem to stumble over all the time, the glue that never sticks or the stuff that has special "finger tip" properties...

Andy I am very sorry to hear about the damage to BAU. 

When I owned our last wooden boat I would have refused to apply a sticker to the topsides, when I own the next one I will do the same and follow Andy up the road if nessacary, but this is easily solved.

Solutions: 
Class agrees to allow application of suitable sponsors logos to main or jib and they're sent out prior to event to be applied correctly and in good time.
Small sponsors flag flown from clew of main up leach, attached by small stitch. (Could be controversial at light air events but same for everybody)
Crew are supplied with logo'd bibs to wear.

All these solutions work for a whole host of classes, boats and events I have been and am involved with.