Clearly the mark boat should have had the new mark in the water or flown "M" much earlier as the post indicates. In small boats, whether you time your tacks with a stopwatch or not, the prudent thing is to proceed toward the new mark direction, which the leading boat did not do. Without knowing other details, it's not clear if abandonment was the best redress.

The jury did the correct thing by abandoning the race.

If the mark boat is going to travel around all day with an inflated change mark, it's best to keep it covered.

In a situation such as this, as soon at the PRO calls for the change, the mark should be in the water so the competitors can see it (towed behind the WM boat if necessary). It doesn't have to magically "appear" at the designated location.

The PRO should have been the one requesting redress. Good PRO's know when they've screwed up and will accept responsibility for their mistakes.

We were racing a SC 70 in Tobago a few years ago in non-spinnaker class. We started after the racing class and passed most of them when the fleet realized that the mark was missing. After calling the race comittee, they abandoned the race for spinnaker class and not for us. The new mark was dropped in the old position which left us 22 minutes passed it. We asked for redress using the PRO as the witness and obtained the time requested. The next mark had also gone adrift and we were following a smaller boat to it. That boat rounded and the even though we were 100 meters behind, the mark boat moved it to windward causing us to have to tack twicw and lose an additional 10 minutes. That time was not granted in the 2nd redress. You win some and you lose some.
The Mount Gay party made up for it.

I race in a class where the beats are frequently 1.5 - 2.0 NM and the sea conditions often make it impossible to see the weather mark from the leeward mark. I have always thought the guidance given in the new rules for changing the course are insufficient to help the sailors get the answer right. If the bearing to the new mark is the only thing that has changed, it is easy for the boats to navigate to the new mark. However, if the length of the leg has changed, the "+"or "-" signs do not give the competitors enough information to effectively and efficiently sail to the new mark.  I would prefer that RCs indicate the approximate length of the new leg, along with its bearing, if the length of the leg is to be changed. That would give the sailors definite information (which is what they get in every other course change situation) instead of indefinite information.

Perhaps this should be an alternative signaling option in the RRS, to be used only when course lengths are longer than 1 NM.  I think it would be helpful.

Butch,
I'm not sure that this is as interesting as you had hoped.

The basic question is "When does a mark have to be in place for a weather leg?"  This could be the weather mark on the first leg of the course, or in this case, the new mark after C is displayed.  

Students of any of our club level race management courses know the answer: the mark has to be in place well before any boat gets near the laylines.  In the case of a weather mark on the first leg, that means no later than when the boats are one-third up the weather leg.  By the time they are half way, they could be by definition on the layline. Same applies in case of a change.

So in the case below, "the mark boat dropped the new mark about 200 yards in front of one of the trailing boats." This obviously doesn't come close to meeting the test, no matter how short the leg was.

So the recommendation is wrong:
"2. The new mark needs to be in the water early enough for the boats to make a good approach."  Unless, of course, the "good approach" follows the test above.

The thing that really messes up this example is that it looks like there was no compelling reason to make the change in the first place.  Legs were short, etc.  Less is often more in the RM game.  Maybe that's the example we should take from this.

jrc

I think there are three issues here:  First, what criteria should the RC use in guiding their own actions; second, what criteria should they use in deciding to abandon the race; and third, what criteria should the PC use in determining whether to grant redress?  

The first question is answered admirably by Clark, Greg and John in the comments above.  Certainly the new mark should be in place before boats are 1/3 the way up the beat, and even then, it's marginal -- I'd say 1/4 the way up the beat.  There's no excuse for the mark boat not to have flag M onboard, and there's nothing in the rules that prevents them from flying that flag as soon as they're on station, while they untie the knots in the anchor rode or whatever.  Then, once the anchor is set, they can drop the flag and move quickly out of the way (assuming nobody has reached the mark yet -- after boats start rounding, I think the mark boat needs to simply keep on station and fly flag M for the entire fleet).  

My answer to the RC abandonment question is in line with what Butch said in his blog:  RCs are reluctant to blow off races in progress, and, in my opinion, rightly so.  Too often, RCs try to make up for their errors by committing another error and abandoning the race.  Except for start signal errors or bizarre cases like the one Tony cites above, it's very difficult for the RC to know whether their error seriously affected the competitors.  I think they should always lean in the direction of letting the race run and leaving to the PC the issue of making up for any errors they've made. Having said that, I strongly urge RC members who come into the protest room on a redress issue:  Please, please don't be defensive.  The race is over, and what's done is done; the PC needs to know exactly what happened out there -- tell them.

The answer to the redress question is more situational.  The criteria for redress, unlike those for good race management, are laid out in the rulebook: the incident has to be (in this case) "an improper action or omission of the race committee", the boat requesting redress has to have been seriously affected by the error, and th boat has to come into the room with "clean hands", i.e., the result was through no fault of her own.  

My interpretation of "improper" is that the RC needs to have done something (or failed to do something) in a way that is either against the rules or is grossly and clearly unfair.  In the present case, I'd say that boats claiming redress need to demonstrate that they themselves didn't screw up (for example, if boats went to the previous mark after the leg had been changed, that was an error on their part and could affect whether they get redress), that the error seriously affected their scores, and that the RC broke the rules (which in this case, they apparently didn't) or behaved in a way that was patently unfair (as they did in Tony's first example, above).  

So, my take is that there's a gray area between good RC behavior and redressable error -- in this case, that gray area starts when boats are about 1/4 the way up the leg and ends when boats have actually tacked for where they legitimately expect the mark to be, and then they discover they were wrong.