ANOTHER GOOD RACING RULES BLOG
As the UK-Halsey Racing Rules Blog gains traction, I've learned of and had contact with another blogger that I'd like to recommend to you.
The blog is called "Racing Rules of Sailing…Look to Windward" and it is written by Jos M Spijkerman from the town of Sneek in the Netherlands. Jos has been blogging for the better part of a year now and "Look to Windward" has lots of information about the rules and many, many good sailing links.
Have a look…the web address is Look to Windward Blog
Last summer I visited Sneek during Sneekweek. Literally hundreds of boats racing on a beautiful lake! The thing I remember most about my visit was driving under an aquaduct to get into town. It was a crazy feeling to look up from a car and see a forty foot sailboat passing over you.
ANOTHER GAME CHANGE
We have had one posting from Rob Overton and hope to have many more. Rob has been helping me update the answers to all the UK-Halsey rules quizzes so that they reflect the upcoming changes ot the rules. While reading through one of his "updates", I came across a game change that really caught me by surprise.
In the existing rules, Rule 19.2 says that Rule 19.1 ROOM TO TACK AT AN OBSTRUCTION does not apply at an obstruction that is also a mark the hailed boat can fetch. So a leeward boat (see illustration below) in Red's place is not entitled to room to tack as long as the boat to windward (Blue) is fetching (and subsequently fetches) the mark. This has always seemed fair to me… the assumption being that the leeward boat had to see the situation developing and should have acted sooner to extricate himself.
The new rules (Rule 20.3) say that Red "shall not hail (for room to tack) if the obstruction is a mark that the hailed boat is fetching BUT if she does hail, the windward boat is now obligated under new Rule 20.1 to respond to that hail by either tacking or hailing back "You tack" and then giving room.
So the game change is that the right of way boat not only has to respond to an improper hail and give up a tactical advantage and to obtain justice after the fact, she may have to protest the leeward boat under Rule 20.3 for making the improper hail. I can just imagine some of the stories the jury will have to listen to when it comes to the improper hail.
Here's another interesting point. The first part of new Rule 20.3 says "A boat shall not hail unless safety requires her to make a substantial course change to avoid the obstruction". So the leeward of two close hauled port tack boats when confronted with a starboard tack boat cannot hail for room to tack if she can duck by altering her course to leeward by a few degrees.
Now read Rule 19.2 (a) which says a right-of-way boat may choose to pass an obstruction on either side. If the right-of-way boat (Blue) in the situation above wants to pass the obstruction (the starboard tack boat) on his starboard hand, why can't he hail for room to tack? Does he break Rule 20.3 by hailing?
There will be more written about this!
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Available in the UK-Halsey online store
As the date for the new rules to go in effect creeps closer and closer, serious sailors are going to be looking out for new sources of "rules intelligence". Here's one worth knowing about.
I recently came across a new racing rules book written by Bryan Willis that I highly recommend. The name of the book is "2009-2012 The Rules in Practice". My rules bible has always been Dave Perry's book and while that allegiance will not change, I suspect that I'll be referring to this book regularly, particularly before sailing in major regattas.
A short CV of Bryan Willis appears later in this blog posting and as I'm sure you'll agree, he's well qualified on the subject. What I have found unique about this book is that his emphasis is not on the rules themselves but rather on explaining what your options are in a given tactical situation.
The book is replete with the typical boat-to-boat encounters we see in every race. Willis puts you in each boat and then explains what you can (and cannot) do and what you should (and should not) do. At the close of each explanation, he cites the rule numbers that pertain but that's it.
This is a different and great perspective and everyone who reads this book will find themselves saying, "I remember doing that…what was I thinking?"
The illustrations in the book are well done and the writing is clear and easily understood. A copy belongs on every sailor's bookshelf. To get yours from the UK-Halsey online store just click here:
BRYAN WILLIS chairs international juries at major events throughout the world. He was Chairman of the Jury for the Sydney Olympics and Chairman of the Jury and Chief Umpire for the last three editions of the America's Cup. He is vice-chairman of the ISAF Rules Committee on which he has served for over 25 years. He has chaired the ISAF Race Management Committee and the ISAF Race Officials Committee and was instrumental in the development of umpiring.
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As I predicted in my second posting on this blog, the phrases "to the mark" and "at the mark" are going to be the subject of a lot of "opinion". My 2nd posting had only been on the air for a short time when I received the following from Rob Overton. For those of you who don't know who Rob is, he is one of the authors of the new rules. Here's a very abbreviated CV. I am very pleased to have Rob's thoughts and hope to receive regular postings from him. BUTCH ULMER
ROB OVERTON
Rob started sailing and racing sailboats in his hometown of Bellport, Long Island, in the 1950’s. He sailed on the Dartmouth College team, then competed in big and small boats in Seattle Washington, where he attended graduate school. He and his wife, Andi, moved to Sheboygan Wisconsin and campaigned an International 470 from1972 to 1979 beforemoving to Hampton Roads, Virginia, where Rob raced Lasers and J/24s. He retired from his job as a mathematician and inventor in 2000; since then, Rob and Andi have been cruisingfull-time in their Stevens Custom 50 sloop, “Akka”.
Rob became involved with the Racing Rules of Sailing in1993, when he joined the US SAILING Racing Rules Committee (RRC) in order to participate in the major revision of 1997. He has been a member of the RRC ever since, serving as chairman from 1997 through 2000. He is a member of the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) Team RaceCall Book Working Party and is an International Umpire. Rob, along with Dick Rose and Ben Altman from the US and Richard Thompson and Chris Atkins from the UK, drafted the new Section C (rules for passing marks and obstructions), recently adopted by ISAF for use in 2009.
ROB'S POSTING
One of the goals of the group that drafted the new Section C rules was to preserve, as much as possible, the current sailing game. The hope was that we could simplify and clarify the rules within that constraint, so that veteran sailors could pretty much keep on sailing as they had in the past, while new sailors could read the rules and figure out what was actually going on. The resulting Section C is shorter, simpler (I think) and clearer than the old Section C. The big question is, did the game change significantly?
Only time will tell, of course. But at first analysis the answer seems to be “Mainly, no game changes – but there are a few.” In my opinion, sailors who have been fleet racing and haven’t been sailing aggressively to the edge of the current rule will find that they can continue sailing pretty much as before, without risk. Those who team-race, match-race or spend a lot of their time closing out other boats at marks and obstructions should study the changes carefully. They should definitely take the new UK-Halsey Rules Quiz when it appears in December, and they might want to read both the Team Race Call Book and Match Race Call Book available on the ISAF website.
In my next few blogs, I’m going to explore a few features of the game we play that I think have changed in the game of sailing as a result of the new rules, and few things that I think haven’t changed even though it might look as if they had.
Note: Throughout these blogs, I’ll refer to the 2005-2008 RRS as the “old rules” and to the 2009-2012 RRS as the “new rules.”
Game Change 1. The zone around marks in the new rules is 3 lengths instead of 2, and rule 18 (Mark-Room) applies when one of the boats involved reaches the zone, not when boats are “about to round”. The change from “about to round” to “in the zone” is probably not very important to most sailors, who generally only applied rule 18 at the two-length zone anyway; but the change in the size ofthe zone will definitely change the game. If you are going to make your inside move on a leeward leg you will have to do so earlier; if you tack near the port-tack layline you now have to tack 3 or 4 boatlengths short of the layline instead of 2 or 3 to avoid the implications of rule 18.3 (Tacking When Approaching a Mark). On the other hand, if you’re the inside boat you will have more time to approach and round a mark under the protection of rule 18, and if you’re on port tack at the right-hand leeward gate mark you’ll get room from outside starboard-tack boats early enough to do a jibe/drop and go round the mark, room which you might not get under the old rules.
So if you’re the type who makes your inside move half way down the leeward leg, who gets ready to give room before you reach the zone, and who is willing to duck some boats when you come into the windward markinside the zone, you won’t notice much difference in the game as a result of the zone size change. If you leave your leeward-mark move to the last minute, enjoy luffing boats inside you when you’re 2-1/2 lengths from the leeward mark, or like to tack inside starboard-tackers when you’re just a hair outside the two-length zone, you’ll notice the zone size change, big time.
Non-Game Change 1. The new definition of Mark-Room says “Room for a boat to sail to the mark, and then room to sail her proper course while at the mark.” In the first phase, while a boat is sailing to the mark, the old rule actually didn’t give any protection to the inside boat – if you read the rule literally, an outside boat could luff an inside boat to the wrong side of the mark and not break therule, as long as she let the other boat in when they were at the mark. (This is because the special definitionof “room” in old rule 18 only talks about space between the outside boat andthe mark – i.e., it only defines room when boats are at the mark, not whilethey are approaching it. So if the mark was, say, dead ahead, then old rule 18 didn’t restrict an outside right-of-way boat at all, even inside the zone.) Fortunately, that’s not how sailors interpreted the rule,and everybody pretty much understood that outside boats were supposed to give inside boats room to sail from the edge of the zone to the mark even if the rule didn’t say so. The new definition’s first part, “Room for a boat to sail tothe mark,” simply brings therules in line with what competitors are already doing.
The second phase of the new definition applies when a boat entitled to room (basically, a boat that was overlapped inside or was clear ahead at the zone) is at the mark itself. And here there’s an interesting change: the old rule only grants that boat “room”, which means space for a seamanlike rounding, whereas the new rule allows her the space she needs “to sail herproper course”. This looks like a big change, but generally I don’t think it is. The time when a boat’s proper course is to sail wide and do a “tactical rounding” (i.e., startwide and finish close), is when she’s approaching the mark, not when she’s at it – and the new Rule 18 doesn’t give a keep-clear boat entitled to mark-roomthe right to start wide, only the right to sail to the mark. Once a boat is at a mark, what is herproper course? I think that almost always, her proper course is to round it, leaving it as close as possible on the required side – exactly the same as a seamanlike rounding. Some rules authorities have suggestedthat the new rules might allow an inside boat to turn away from the mark andthen back toward it, in order to do a “tactical rounding”. But is that really true? She’s already at the mark, and if she were by herself, would she now turn away from the mark instead of toward it? I don’t think so. Turning awayfrom the mark at that point only wastes time. I think if I were on a protest committee and a sailor told me that instead of rounding the mark at that point she had sailed her “proper course” in turning away from it, I’d want to see some kind of argument demonstrating that turning the wrong way is faster than turning the right way. Wouldn’t you?
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This posting deals with a new, added definition called Mark-Room.As you will see, there is a lot to this definition and, in my opinion, there will be a lot of discussion about some of the wording in it. I will post enough to get you thinking but for sure you'll be seeing a lot more written about Mark-Room.
Mark-Room Room for a boat to sail to the mark, and then room to sail her proper course while at the mark. However, mark-room does not include room to tack unless the boat is overlapped to windward and on the inside of the boat required to give mark-room.
First of all, to understand what mark-room is, you will have to have your rulebook handy because it uses a bunch of other definitions as part of the text e.g. room, proper course, mark, etc.
Second, note that a boat will be entitled to mark-room while sailing to the mark and then room to sail her proper course while at the mark.
I predict that "sailing to the mark" and being "at the mark" are phrases that will create no small amount of "opinion".
There is one thing that jumped right out at me and that's the part about room to sail your proper course while at the mark.
As things stand now, Rule 18.2 (a) requires an outside boat to give an inside overlapped boat room to round or pass… and if the inside boat is a right of way boat, the outside boat must also keep clear.
In practice what this means is that the inside boat gets room to do a tactical rounding if she's a right of way boat but if not, she is entitled to just enough room to round in a seamanlike way.
Under the new rules, the inside boat will always be entitled to do a tactical rounding because she can sail her proper course while at the mark.
THIS IS A GAME CHANGE!
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Welcome to the initial posting of my racing rules of sailing blog. I’ve been spurred to writing in this public forum because of the numerous and substantial changes to the rules of the game as of January 1st,2009.
As you will see, the new rules change the nature of the game in many ways as they deal with the most complicated parts of the rules, SECTION C… AT MARKS AND OBSTRUCTIONS.
To help you understand the changes, I will from time to time, post the old rule or definition as well as the new one so you can compare one to the other.
Let's look at one of the new definitions:
ZONE "The area around a mark within a distance of three hull lengths of the boat nearer to it. A boat is in the zone when any part of her hull is in the zone."
The existing definition is entitled the TWO-LENGTH ZONE and it will no longer exist after January 1st. It is defined as:
"The area around a mark or obstruction within adistance of two hull lengths of the boat nearer to it."
Note the changes:
1. The size of the zone has increased from two hull lengths to three hull lengths.
2. There is no zone around an obstruction.
3. A boat is NOT in the zone unless her hull is in the zone.
#3 above is a “first” in that the criteria for being in zone is just your hull. In all other instances that I can think of in the rules (starting, finishing, overlap) the criteria is not just your hull but it also includes equipment and in some cases your crew. Now it’s just your hull! So if you are sailing a sprit boat, a boat with a bowsprit or a boat with a spinnaker pole extension, you have to remember that these appendages don’t count when it comes to being in the zone.
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