Standard of Proof?

1 Rule 44 makes no mention of protests. The rule is a manfestation of the Basic Principle, providing a means for a boat that may have broken a rule to "promptly take a penalty".
2 If a boat that may have broken a rule announces that she is taking a penalty this is not an admission of liability or that she has broken a rule (RYA Prescriptions rule 68)
3. The infringed boat should initiate the protest procedure immediately after the incident. In dinghies just shout protest (before asking infringing boat to do her turns!).
4 This initiates a series of procedures - especially the one in which a boat may take a penalty immediately.
5 Any protest must be about the initial incident. Only then can the  protest committee discuss whether an appropriate penalty has been taken.
6 If it is found that a boat acknowledged that a boat would take a penalty and then did not do so the protest committee may decide that this is a breach of rule 2. The proof required is "balance of possibilities"and the only penalty for a breach of rule 2 is DNE.
7 If the protest committee decides to take the rule 69 route then the burden of proof becomes "beyond reasonable doubt", but the penalty can range from a warning to exclusion from the sport for life.
8 Any witness may appear before the protest committee. There is no reason not to use Race Committee (which includes safety boat crew) as witnesses, indeed they are often very useful.

I was talking to an Australian judge  recently. They seem to set the bar for using rule 69 very high. On the other hand bad or unsporting behaviour may be dealt with (in the context of a sailing scene in which there are relatively isolated centres of activity with few people enganged in long distance trailing to events) very effectively by club committees or class captains.

Well this debate has been hugely informative and it's been interesting to see everyone's views and interpretations of the rules.

Several points keep recurring in this debate, and as someone trying to generate some positive ways forward out of this I see a couple of awkward points that border on paradoxes!

The first is the requirement for an immediate "Protest!" hail in any incident. I agree that the "letter of the law" does indeed confirm this, in the sense that if you say any other word then doing so demonstrates that  you did not say the word "protest" at the earliest opportunity. I think I appreciate why all the rules "gurus" on here keep banging on about this but I still have a problem with this strict interpretation.

We spend hours and hours trying to instill a sense of fair play in our junior sailors, and encouraging them to "play nice" for want of a better phrase. I have a huge feeling of reluctance to encourage them to shout "PROTEST!" at each other even in cases where the guilty party immediately admits fault and voluntarily opts to take a penalty. It just seems so damned aggressive!  Even if immediately followed up with a conditional "unless you do turns" or whatever, it still sounds belligerent compared to the much less confrontational option of politely asking for a penalty first.

However you wrap this up, it just seems like we're actively encouraging people to be more aggressive, which is the very problem we're trying to solve here!

I've read all the posts on this lengthy thread that make a very persuasive argument about this and I can take a lot of that on board but I'm still having major doubts. So I'm really struggling to see how I'm going to get this idea across to the rest of our coaches and instructors who haven't been a party to this conversation!

To me it would make far more sense if the rule were re-worded in such a way as to make it acceptable to give the guilty party a reasonable opportunity to exonerate themselves first (perhaps with an approved wording to call), and only then have to hail protest.

The other conundrum relates to point that was made a few posts ago to the effect of "Why do juniors always have less respect for the rules than adults?"

Well one thing that's really stood out from this whole saga is that justice seems far less accessible to juniors than to adults due to the very nature of the protest system. If we leave aside the much debated hailing issue and accept that the protest debated in this topic was valid, then what we were left with was a situation where B failed to win a protest simply because she was outwitted by the adults conducting the hearing.

In a nutshell, the adult members of the PC introduced doubt over the evidence of "C" by clever cross-examination. It would have been a reasonably simple task for a fairly astute adult protester to have removed this doubt again by some analysis of the evidence, but for a timid 13 year old facing a committee of four adults that's a big ask, and in this case it allowed the protest to be dismissed out of hand.

So in this instance the junior comes away with the impression that to win a protest they have to be as smart as an adult. So it's easy to understand why they might further decide that justice is therefore not available for them and with that lose any respect for the rules system.

And that's just the ones that start out with a responsible frame of mind! What about the ones who start out by "trying it on" through a youthful sense of mischief? As in this case, they find that they never actually get brought to book for it in protests because the evidence gets defeated as above so they also lose any little respect for the rules  they might have started out with!

Agreed, its all about the basic issue of self enforcement. And this pseudo legalistic sea lawyer approach of " if you don't hail protest first and have the flag up in 10 seconds" thing is diametrically opposed to that.

Consider a typical club race incidents.

No 1: boat A brushes a mark and is unaware (or at least hopeful) that they just cleared it.

The typical scenario round here would be

Boat B "'fraid you just hit it Bill"
Boat A "I thought I just cleared it"
Boat C, "Nope, you touched it all right, 'fraid you'd better do the turn."
Boat A, "Oh *** it, OK."

Compare that with the scenario that the rules currently demand and which IMNSHO needs changing.

Boat B - "PROTEST!"
Boat C - "PROTEST!!"
Boat A, "WHAT THE **** FOR?"

The friendly atmosphere disappears out of the window and the day is soured. An aggressive note is immediately inserted into the proceedings, and one that is quite unnecessary.

Provided the protested boat is aware that they are being protested then it is quite unnecessary that it should be the first word out of someones mouth or that the flag is waved within 3 seconds rather than 30 seconds. If the protested boat is unaware of the protest then that should be a matter to vary the penalty being applied rather than to throw the protest out completely. If a protest is throw out completely it may well mean that the innocent suffer and the guilty go free. This is all a hangover (as you say above) from the bad old days. Well so what.

You'll doubtless say that this sort of approach won't work in Grand prix situations. Maybe so, but that should be a matter for Sailing Instructions, not rules. No reason why SIs shouldn't be permitted to change the procedure and demand immediate hails for Grand prix events and the like.

Originally posted by Brass If competitors who want to see others penalised for breaking the rules do not, for whatever reason, comply with the rules for valid protests, then nobody should be complaining that the rules weren't bent so as to delive their personal perception of appropriate penalty; and

We're complaining that the rules as they are are biased towards sea lawyers and those who take advantage of the strict letter of the law, and against those of us who would prefer to conduct our racing in a quiet manner without personal verbal aggression, but recognise that occasionally there will arise a situation where a protest is required. The sport is not well served by permitting rule breaches to be exonerated simply because the *injured/innocent* party does not do exactly the right thing as quickly as possible.




Edited by JimC - 14 Jun 12 at 8:49am

I don't think it's necessary for the word protest to be seen as aggressive.
In JimC's example above, hailing protest ASAP puts things on a proper footing, everyone knows where they stand.
Otherwise you slip into grey areas of banter.
I wouldn't use the word 'protest' unless I was totaly sure the other boat had touched the mark, but I might say 'I think you hit that' when I was not 100% sure, or use other words that are open to interpretation.
I get the feeling that mine is not the only club where it would be nice to give the rules as they today a proper try, before talking about changing them.

In our club there is a tendency to say 'we are a friendly club, we don't do protests', which means some incidents are not cleared up and can cause friction for months. We could do with working through a few cases where there are genuine misunderstandings of the the rules, in races that are not crucial for a series, so that people begin to understand and respect the process.

'we are a friendly club, we don't do protests',  translated in to plain English usually means "we don't really bother with the rules"

Sailing without rules and protests is the nautical equivalent of kick around in the park. Fun but not a race!