ALL ABOVE BOARD

Peter Valentino interviews Jovin Rausi, a sailor, an official, a friend to everyclub and a mentor to many individuals. He served the sport for decades, and thetrade too, through an insurance firm he once owned.

Jovin Rausi with Albert Fenechand Martin Meachin

This interview isn’t a straightforward one because your involvement in the sailing and boating world is so vast, it has ‘a finger in every pie’. When and how did your adventure begin?

Ever since I can remember, my grandmother (who brought me up) loved the sea, she never owned a boat, but every year she used to rent a place in St Paul’s Bay and we used to spend the summer there. Swimming every day, and occasionally joined by my cousins, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, fishing with our nets in tal-Għażżenin, and chasing cockroaches on the pavement in the evenings. What fun it was for us kids, but not for the cockroaches though.

My father was an avid fisherman always with a fishing rod over the weekend and hardly ever catching anything. He just enjoyed the tranquillity and solitude of the beach. But when I could join him, I loved to go on the rocks at the Sirens Club chasing crabs. It was then that I was first infected with the love for the sea and remains a very serious and incurable disease right to this very day. When in my thirties, in the 70s, I bought my first sailing boat dinghy, I knew then that there was no hope for me. I was seriously addicted to the sea and sailing.

Let’s go to actual sailing and racing. What memories do you hold closest to your heart?

I got my first taste of sailing at Mellieħa bay. I had just bought a GP 14 and I parked it on a trolley in tal-Għażżenin. The seller had promised to teach me how to sail but in that same weekend the dinghy championships were taking place. In those days, it was run by the Royal Malta Yacht Club and at Mellieħa Bay. I did not want to miss that. So, on my own I launched the dinghy in a gregale, and I somehow managed to sail, single-handed, all the way around Mellieħa. I learned how to sail along the way, sailing for the first time ever.

Mellieħa Bay was home to the Għadira Sailing Club and countless regattas for both dinghies and windsurfing. It was not at all unusual to see 130 dinghies on the start line and an even bigger number of windsurfers. What a sight from the bridge. Every event was followed by a big party at the Mellieħa Bay Hotel. What pleasant memories.

You started officiating at a relatively young age. How come, and which part of this did you enjoy?

I was competing in a dinghy championship in 1974 (run by the RMYC) and Benny Grech was on the bridge, mostly on his own, and trying (unsuccessfully) to get the dinghies to start a race off to a clean start. He was on his own and I asked how come he was alone. He said that everyone wants to sail instead and no one wants to help. I stopped racing in championships after that event and I went on the bridge to help him. I am an avid organiser in everything I do. I am a Virgo you see.

That was 45 years ago, and I am still on that ‘bridge’, be it dinghies, windsurfing, yachting, or even in the Protest Room. Quite frankly, there were others who knew the rules and how to organise racing. I just happened to be the right man at the right time and in the right place. Fewer today, but in the same situation, and their absence will be a great setback to sailing if they had to hang up their rule book. I enjoyed every event I organised, too many to count in the past 45 years, and was fortunate enough to find support throughout, similarly enthused, to do safety and help organise.

Can you please give us some insight regarding your involvement in the Malta Sailing Federation, The Għadira Sailing Club, The Games of the Small States and The Royal Malta Yacht Club?

The Yachting Federation was born out of a protest by dinghy sailors against the lack of adequately knowledgeable people on the bridge on how to run within the then IYRU Rules, dinghy racing, and even more less when it came to listening to our protests. True that if it were not for these volunteers there would not have been any serious dinghy racing. But sailors were becoming keen to race and their knowledge of the rules became endemic. Still, during a dinghy championship in Mellieha in the late 1970s, several of us sailors met on the jetty at the Tunny Net in Mellieha Bay and we agreed to approach all the dinghy clubs for us to set up a Federation, later called the Malta Yachting Federation. In 1975 it was constituted through an elected committee under Walter Camilleri who was its first president.

All the dinghy clubs at the time, including the RMYC, joined the Federation and it has since then done sailing a good service. It later changed its name to Malta Sailing Federation and it is still here today. I was one of its elected members, its secretary, vice-president, and president during my 21-year tenure on the Committee during which time I was also elected to represent sailing on the Malta Olympic Committee. I was also a founder member of the Għadira Sailing Club set up with the active encouragement and practical logistical support of Chris Scott Taggart, the then manager at the Mellieħa Bay Hotel.

The club was set up officially on the 4th of September 1980 and it was for many years a great and successfully strong family dinghy sailing club with wives joining in the racing as crews, but not crewing for their husbands to avoid the risk of divorce and separations! Word went around the sailing grape vine that at the Għadira Sailing Club sailors were wife swapping. True, in a way, but it was not what you are thinking.

Here too, at the GSC, I went through the ranks, including commodore, serving as a member for over two decades. The onset of windsurfing changed all that, and it happened at a time when dinghy racing was already on the wane, and some, even today, still accuse me of killing off dinghy sailing for windsurfers, not at all true, but more of that later. I was asked by the Malta Olympic Committee to run the sailing event of the Small Nation Games (GSSE) in 1993. (There was no one else to do that at the time!) I was again approached in 2003 to do the same for the GSSE 2003.

Both were extremely successful events with Malta winning a record haul of medals, including Gold. Windsurfing joined the event for the 2003 event and here too, medals were won with great satisfaction to the sailing community. I was an elected member of the MOC for 21 years and was selected to represent Malta at the Los AngelesOlympic Games where I accompanied theMaltese teams participating in these Games, as well as in many other international events for sailing where Malta was represented.

Middles Sea Race, 1996

Presenting an award to Francesca Vincent, 1988

I became a member of the Royal Malta YachtClub so many years ago. I was an elected member of the committee for many years andI helped out on the bridge where necessary, and in the Protest Room. John Ripard (Sr) had invited me to sit on the International MartiniMiddle Sea Race during the 1980s. The club has since honoured me by inviting me to sit on the Rolex Middle Sea Race International Protest Committee and that was a great experience and which I shall always cherish as the icing on the ‘sailing career’ cake. The RMYC has changed its spots since when I first joined. The main activity of the club seems to be yacht racing now, perhaps at the expense of the cruising section?

The Hon Dr Michael Refalo presenting the Middle Sea Race sponsorship to Mr. Jovin Rausi

But they know best I assume. Yes, it has changed, positively perhaps, because at the time of joining it was run by many expats who seemed mainly concerned with their status on the committee more than with sailing. Some were sailors and boat owners in their own time, but not always quite approachable or even knowledgeable of the rules of sailing.

In one protest committee hearing I was asked to give my version of events after I protested another boat following which statement I was asked to leave the room. I protested at this because the rules had since been changed allowing both protestor and protestee to hear each other’s statements of the facts as they saw them. The panel was not aware of this new rule and they insisted that I leave the room, with me not knowing what the other sailor (the protestee) had said. I won the protest anyway but it indicated the need for a federation to be above all clubs, and indeed, this did happen in 1975.

When the Royal Malta Yacht Club decided to restart the then Middle Sea Race, now the world-famous Rolex Middle Sea Race; the Commodore then called upon you to be the Chairman of the Organising Committee. Can you list some of the challenges you faced, some of the concerns and also the most pleasant moments and memories you hold?

That was indeed a great honour and an even greater pleasure to do for the two events, one in 1998 and again in 1999. The biggest challenge was to re-organise, and re-wire, the mentality and ingrained practices of committee members who (as ex-naval officers but still not knowing the racing rules) were used to have a free hand based on their rank and status within the club, irrespective of the fact that a separate committee was running the MSR event. The RMYC Committee members were invited to join our committee as long as they held an office on the MSR committee. We had a job to do, and I alone (it seemed to me at the time) knew what needed to be done to have a successful event and I agreed to run the event on one condition.

No one, not even the Commodore, could reverse any decision taken by the autonomous Middle Sea Race Committee of which I was Chairman, (the Commodore was vice-Chairman) without an express agreement by me to such changes. In other words, no rank pulling. One other struggle was to persuade people that committee members could no longer come in to the club at Couvre Porte with their friends and families and eat and drink for free upon their signature at the bar. Food coupons were issued and drinks had to be paid for. It was sometimes a struggle, a battle with some, but eventually it worked, people saw the sense in what we were trying to do and everything was fine.

Remember that in those days we did not have Martini to sponsor us and the days of milk and honey were well over. In fact, John Ripard (Sr) and I begged three ministers asking for financial assistance every year the Middle Sea Race was approaching and it was not the time to just spend and drain that milk cow dry! Happily, we got all the financial help we needed, ironically from ministers from the two main political parties as an election popped up when the MSR was restarted. But both parties supported our pleas for help as they realised the enormous potential to the country and tourism. We were successful and the re-organisation worked so much so that the MSR race grew, and we got more Italian participation, we got maxis, we got Rolex, and the rest is history.

There were no real worries, not after we introduced Datatrack on each boat after we first tested it on my own boat half way to Sicily with Tony Terreni, the Club Secretary and an Italian technician who tested the equipment. In my role as communications officer I arranged for each boat to have a full set of phone/ contact numbers of all the maritime stations run by the Sicilian authorities along the entire 600 miles long (quasi) Sicilian coast, for competitors to report their positions and which station to call in case of an emergency.

Of course, and perhaps typically, some (mostly Maltese) boats did not report their position as requested and some even switched off their responders so that we, and the other competitors, did not know where they were! Incredible, when our main scope was to ensure that everyone was safe. There was a time when at the Club we were not allowed to give out the position of the boats racing and we had to face some angry wives and mothers who were anxious to know where their loved ones were on the course. Well with transponders switched off and no reporting by the boats racing, there was no point in secrecy. Technology changed all that.

Ironically the action of non-reporting and the switching off of transponders relieved us of any liability as boats racing then undertook to take upon themselves their safety, relieving us of any responsibility of being able to assist them. Crazy thing!

The datatracking devices were important in one particular year when just minutes before prize-giving, we received the results of the tracking. One boat whose skipper was about to step up to the podium for his prize was stopped in his tracks (no pun intended) as the tracking sheet of his boat revealed that he had missed rounding Stromboli!

Happily, the tracking and the listing of ‘safe’ Sicilian stations has endured and is still done in today’s Rolex Race, improved greatly today thanks to satellite technology.

Pleasant memories? – Prize-giving! Not for the canapés and the drinks but for the relief of knowing that, mostly, boats were already, and by that time, either in the marina or in their home ports and that all were safe and sound. The contribution by the volunteers of every section cannot be underestimated. We all worked as one team. Us organisers in knowing that we could rely on the dedication and enthusiasm of the volunteers and the volunteers happy on seeing that we meant business and that we knew what we organisers were doing.

In a chronological order, we’re now somewhere at the time when the Malta Young Sailors Club was formed. You were and still are so passionate about this club. What do you see in it?

I was honoured to be involved in this event from day one of its birth. I remember meeting other volunteers at the Gillieru or at Sarah Grech’s

office (I was the only man among many women then – and I greatly enjoyed those meetings!) - plotting the event and making sure that we had all the logistical support we needed. We did, and it was a great success, again thanks to good leadership in every department by the volunteers and to the enthusiastic and dedicated helpers. Parents were of great help too as they provided rubber dinghies for safety.

This culminated to the then-government granting land to the MYSC and it today houses one of the most successful dinghy clubs on the island. I am passionate about the club because like a son or daughter, and now I have grandchildren, I have seen it grow, provide good sailors, and yet, in spite of the age limits imposed on the Optimist class, it still provided new sailors who in turn keep feeding the sport with experienced sailors who later join the Laser fleet and even the crew on the bigger boats. My feeling is clubs like the RMYC should play a bigger role in supporting such clubs because these youngsters are their club’s own future as well.

Greatly instrumental in this success was Anna Rossi and her team. Anna was the motor which drove the success of the MYSC, and she is there even today after a long stint as President of the Malta Sailing Federation.

The second part of this interview will appear in Skipper's October edition.