There is an error in my blog of 14 April about notification requirements for protests and times for voluntary penalties. Protest flags are not required for boats under 6 meters in length (about 20 feet). My blog erroneously gave 8 meters (about 25 feet) as the minimum length for the flag requirement.
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Last month, Scuttlebutt published an article by Peter Wilson, complaining that we, as competitors and judges alike, are neither obeying nor enforcing the Fundamental Principle of our sport, as stated in Sportsmanship and the Rules at the beginning of our rulebook. In particular, he notes that sailors are not doing their turns when they know they've broken a rule, and they're not protesting when they know they've been fouled. I've been thinking about that, and there's one thing we rules writers and regatta organizers might do to address this problem: Relax the time and notification requirements for protesting and for taking penalties.
Rule 61.1(a) says, "A boat intending to protest shall inform the other boat at the first reasonable opportunity. When her protest concerns an incident in the racing area that she is involved in or sees, she shall hail 'Protest' and conspicuously display a red flag at the first reasonable opportunity for each. She shall display the flag until she is no longer racing. ..."
The rule goes on to say that these notification requirements are relaxed in certain cases: no hail is required if the boats are too far apart to hear hails, no flag is required for boats shorter than 8 meters (about 25 feet), and none of the requirements apply if there was injury and damage and it's clear that one boat intends to protest. But these are just common-sense exceptions and in most cases don't relieve a protestor of the basic requirement, which is to "inform the other boat at the first reasonable opportunity."
Most protest committees give the protestor a little slack when it comes to the flag - after all, a crewmember has to be freed up to take care of it, and in many boats that means going below, grabbing the flag and tying it up on the shroud or backstay - but in the case of the hail, most protest committees interpret "first reasonable opportunity" to mean "almost immediately". Hailing doesn't involve getting a flag out of the cabin, and if there are no injured crewmembers to care for or damage to fix, protest committees feel that there's really no excuse for delaying the hail.
The requirements for taking a voluntary penalty are similarly strict. Rule 44.2 says "After getting well clear of other boats as soon after the incident as possible, a boat takes a One-Turn or Two-Turns Penalty by promptly making the required number of turns in the same direction ... ." Again, "as soon after the incident as possible" pretty much means right away, unless the boat is among other boats and needs to get clear. Otherwise, there's no excuse for not immediately sailing to a vacant spot and "promptly" spinning.
The assumption, in both instances, is that competitors understand the rules well enough to know, immediately after the incident, who was right and who was wrong. But is that a realistic assumption? Maybe in team or match racing, where competitors know the rules (and the plays) as if they were written on the insides of their eyelids; but what of ordinary sailors who understand the rules moderately well but may not be actively thinking of which rules apply, in rapidly changing situations? In many scenarios, more than one rule applies, so competitors must work through which rules do apply and, if those rules have different outcomes, which ones prevail over the others. And it's reasonable that the crew might discuss the issues before deciding who, if anybody, was at fault.
In match racing, there are two umpires following every move and discussing, as the race progresses, which boat has what rights under the rules at any given time. Despite the fact that those umps are (presumably) experts on the rules and have nothing to do but to decide which boat is right and which boat is wrong, it frequently takes them a minute or two to come to a decision after an incident. Why do we expect sailors, who are generally not "rulies" and who have to pay attention to little things like sailing their boats as well as to the rules, to be faster than match-race umpires in deciding which boat should take a penalty?
In any case, what's the hurry?
There are two arguments in favor of immediate, or almost immediate, protest notification and penalty-taking: The first is to keep a clear relationship between the incident and the protest and/or penalty, and the second is to encourage (well, require) competitors in a self-policing sport to know the rules well enough to know at all times which rules apply and to which boat.
I question the premises of both these arguments. First, consider the issue of tying the protest to the incident. In the vast majority of racing, incidents where rules are broken are quite rare; I'm pretty confident that if a boat is involved in an incident with another boat and, a few minutes later, the other boat tells her she's protesting, the protestee will generally know what it's all about, but if there's any doubt about it she could always ask "What for?" The second argument, that the current notice requirements induce sailors to learn the rules, is patently false - faced with a rules question such as those in the UK/Halsey Rules Quiz, how many ordinary sailors can come up with the right answer without thinking about it? Actually, how many skippers could come up with the correct answer at all, without some discussion with their crew? Yet that's exactly what we require everybody to do on the racecourse.
It is clear that the requirements of rules 44.2 and 64.1 are disincentives to taking voluntary penalties and protesting - which is the heart of Sportsmanship and the Rules. Every time some Opti sailor is fouled and his or her protest is thrown out by the protest committee because he waited for the other boat to spin and/or had to think about the incident before protesting, that kid learns a lesson: Don't protest. And of course the other kid learns a lesson, too: Don't spin.
What can be done about the severe time requirements for hailing and taking penalties? I have two suggestions. The first is easy - rules 44 and 64 can be modified by sailing instructions, so local regattas and series could have an SI saying something like 'Rules 44.2 and 64.1 are changed by replacing the words "as soon after the incident as possible" in rule 44.2 and the two instances of "at the first reasonable opportunity [for each]" in rule 64.1 with "before the end of the leg on which the incident occurs, or, if the incident occurs inside the zone of a mark, before the end of the next leg".' Or, if the race committee thinks that's too generous, state a different limit in time or distance.
My second suggestion is to change the Racing Rules of Sailing. This is a little tricky because the RRS have to accommodate the full range of competitions from novice racing to the Olympics, but perhaps both rules could make some reference to the decision process aboard the boats involved. For example, rule 44.2 might say, "as soon as possible after she decides she may have broken a rule ..." or something like that. Such wording would guide protest committees toward a real-life fact: Deciding which boat broke what rules can take time, and the less experienced the sailors, the more time should be allowed for turns and/or protests, in order to preserve the fundamental principle of our sport.
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