Rules Observance

Same thing happened to us a few years ago.

The RO drew the course on the board and five minutes later he changed his mind and decided to reverse the course so without communication he altered the course board......of course half the racers saw the first diagram, half saw the second. It became clear at the five minute signal that something was amiss. The race started and there was chaos. If memory serves the RO abandoned the race and asked the safety boat to give instructions......I think most of us had a chuckle about it.

Re RO's administering justice. Surely as RO's we are too far away to see anything but the most obvious infringements?  I couldn't tell if someone has hit the mark unless I was sitting right on their transom and if you can't see everything (impossible) then best not set yourself up as judge and jury. It seem patronising and a whole kettle of fish, best treat them like adults.

Well, I mentioned checking a couple of times, but what I think you have in mind is a process for competitor initiated review of scoring (without having to start off with a formal request for redress).

Experienced race committees and judges have been using a Scoring Review Request process to address problems with apparent scoring mistakes for some time, although it is not well documented.

Competitors may submit a Scoring Review Request form, showing details of the error which they think has been made, and sometimes containing short evidence statements from other competitors in support (such as surrounding competitors in an OCS issue, or finishing place issue).

The Scoring Review Request is passed on to the Race Officer who reviews the race committee records such as original finishing sheets and start and finish voice recordings, and makes any corrections to final scores necessary as required by rule 90.3( c ).

Review by RO works well.  I've seen half a dozen redress requests about OCS resolved in twenty minutes by the race officer playing the voice record tapes to the competitors, who then happily withdrew their requests.

Maybe we need Racing Rules of Sailing Lite which would allow all sorts of offences currently forbidden, which would see a major expansion of our sport.

I was being ironic ... some posters have suggested that the rules are holding back the development of the sport, I don’t share that opinion

Part 2 Is 5 pages of 190 pages of the RRS and probably represents 99% of what the average weekend warrior needs to know and understand in order to get around the racecourse without endangering other competitors.

Perhaps this could be stripped out of the RRS and presented in a more visual manner (to be fair to the RYA I think they did this).

I think the rules work pretty well, the problems occur not because they don’t work, but because as in all walks of life there are people who don’t bother to learn them, or people choose to ignore them, or people choose to write their own.