I just spent a couple of weeks judging and umpiring, first at the Baker Cup (US High-School Team Race Championships) and then at the National Intercollegiate Championships for Women, Team Racing and Co-Ed Dinghies. All these events were in predominantly light wind, so a big part of the responsibility of my fellow judges and umpires, and myself, was to enforce rule 42 PROPULSION.
There are three different “authoritative” sources regarding rule 42. First is the rule itself. Second is the Official ISAF Interpretation.(http://www.sailing.org/tools/documents/42interpretations2010final-%5B8881%5D.pdf)
And third is the Class Rules of the class involved. In the case of the Baker Cup, there are no class rules, as no class is specified in the sailing instructions (the boats were Club 420s supplied by the Organizing Authority, but class rules did not apply). In the case of the collegiate championships, the class is “Collegiate Dinghies” as defined in the Collegiate Dinghy Class Rules (http://www.collegesailing.org/archive/2009-2012_PR_And_2009_CDCR.pdf).
At all the events above save the ICSA Team Race championships, I was asked to present my view of rule 42 at the Competitors’ Meeting, as a guide to what the judges or umpires would be looking for. The gist of my comments is below. Note that in these comments I use the colloquial term “cheating” for breaking rule 42. I don’t mean that breaking rule 42 is any worse than breaking some other rule, I just mean that the boat involved was trying to propel the boat illegally and thus breaking a rule intentionally, i.e., cheating.
The people who drafted rule 42 (and I was one of them, at least for parts of it) did not think that good seamanship meant sitting like statues in the boat; we all know that there is nothing more seamanlike (or more pleasing) than a well-executed roll tack, or a combination of rudder and heel that turns a boat perfectly with minimum drag. The perfect rule would allow such acts of seamanship and penalize all the things people might do to propel the boat without good seamanship.
The rule consequently is a bit complicated. It has three parts: 42.1 tells us what the rule is all about and contains some exceptions to prohibited actions; 42.2 lists some actions that are simply prohibited whether or not they propel the boat; and 42.3 lists more exceptions, which are actions allowed even if they do propel the boat.
The rule is designed to reward good seamanship and to penalize “air rowing” or sculling around the course (in addition to lots of other actions we never even think about, such as literally paddling, or running the motor). Most rule-42 violations are either the result of poor seamanship or deliberate efforts to break the rule.
Let me give an example. A dinghy comes to the leeward mark. As she begins to round, the crew moves to leeward and heels the boat. This action steers the boat around the mark with minimum use of the rudder, and is good seamanship, so it’s allowed under the rule. Then, when the boat reaches a close-hauled course, the crew flattens it. According to the rule 42.1, it’s legal to “adjust the trim of sails and hull”, so the flattening is simply good seamanship, allowed under the rule. (The ISAF Interpretations say that this flattening is illegal if it has “the effect of a stroke of a paddle”, but in Club 420’s this basically can’t happen, and in any case, I think the Interpretation is wrong because rule 42 doesn’t say anything even vaguely like that. But if you’re sailing, say, a Vanguard 15, you might want to bring the rig up smoothly and use the flattening to take a higher angle rather than to gain speed; that’s apparently legal even under the ISAF Interpretations.)
So what can go wrong? Well, what judges see all the time is this: Either the roll was too small or too great and the skipper had to use too much rudder during the rounding, or the flattening was mistimed, or the sheet was too tight or too loose. Either way, the boat ends up sitting more or less dead in the water, at the leeward mark. Then the skipper (or skipper and crew) solves this problem by stepping down to the leeward tank to heel the boat again, and then coming back up to windward to flatten the boat again. This is “rocking”, which is prohibited by the rule. As a fellow judge once put it to me, you don’t get two bites out of that apple!
For another example, consider the start. Just before the starting signal, a boat headed below close-hauled heels to leeward, turns up to close-hauled, and then flattens. The heel facilitates steering and the flattening is trimming the hull to its new upwind heel angle, so all of this is good seamanship and doesn’t break rule 42 (with the same caveat as above, regarding “stroke of a paddle” in the Interpretations – very easily-driven boats should probably moderate that flattening a little, or use it to gain gauge instead of speed).
But consider a boat that finds herself halfway into the second row just before the start. She’s already close hauled, trying to get to the line before the starting signal, but in bad air. To gain way, she heels and then flattens. The original heel was not to facilitate steering (the boat didn’t turn) and so the purpose of the combined heel and flattening is simply to propel the boat, which is illegal. (Note that this rocking need not actually propel the boat – the mere action is illegal according to rule 42.2(b).) When I’m on-the-water judging for large fleets, I especially watch the boats that are a half-length behind or going too slowly, one or two seconds before the starting signal – they’re the ones most likely to cheat in order to get a seat in the front row at the start.
There’s one action at the starting line that’s allowed even though we might not think of it as the best seamanship. If a boat is moving slowly and is above close hauled, she’s allowed to scull her way down to a close-hauled course. This rule-42 exception might be thought of as a “mercy clause” – if the wind is very light, a boat caught in irons might have no other way to turn to a close-hauled course and get moving again other than sculling to turn the boat. We didn’t want to leave boats sitting in irons, so we allowed that specific action. But note that the exception is very restrictive: the boat must be above close-hauled when she starts sculling, and she has to turn toward a close-hauled course (which might mean going through head to wind and onto the opposite tack).
Easily the most common action whistled in the high-school and college championships this year was illegal sculling – either the boat was below close-hauled and the driver wanted to turn down further without gaining way, or she sculled one way and then reversed the helm and sculled the other way, or she backed her mainsail and sculled as if to turn the boat downwind without actually turning the boat (“crabbing”). All of these actions are illegal – as is sculling into the second jibe of a two-turn penalty, which we saw (and whistled) a few times.
Out on the course, we did see some pumps and other prohibited actions that were attempts to establish overlaps at zones or to get bow-out at the finish. These actions are all well understood by the competitors to be illegal, and were simply the result of yielding to temptation in a stressful moment. They’re also cheating, so nobody really had much of a problem with the umpires calling those actions. One call involved ooching in non-surfing conditions*, and that did raise some questions: the crew of a boat was flexing her knee repeatedly and forcefully as she stood holding the boom out, dead downwind. The rule says “sudden forward body movement, stopped abruptly”, and the girl’s coach argued that rapid motions of the knee were not motions of the body, just the knee; but our attitude was, the knee bone’s connected to the thighbone and the … well, you get the gist. Besides, if she wasn’t ooching, what was she doing? Dancing to the beat of a different drummer?
Almost all the other violations we saw were isolated actions, such as roll tacks or jibes in the college championships that broke the college class rules (i.e., the mast aggressively left the perpendicular more than once) or rocking after a jibe was complete. These violations were probably just bad seamanship; several coaches pointed out to us that the boats carried out the maneuver so badly that they didn’t actually gain from it. But rocking breaks rule 42.2, which simply bans the action regardless of whether it propels the boat. (To see why the rule is written this way, imagine trying to judge whether a crew rocking their boat actually propelled her, when she was sailing downwind in a good breeze – any rule that required such judgment would be unenforceable.)
So to avoid getting penalized under rule 42 we should learn how to do really good roll tacks and jibes that don’t break the rule, and learn exactly how and when to heel the boat when rounding a mark, to steer without using the rudder, then flatten the boat. In other words, we should practice good seamanship until it’s second nature. And we should curb the temptation to yanking on the mainsheet just as we get to the zone or by jibing and over-flattening right at the finish line to go bow-out on the boat alongside us – that’s not only not good seamanship, it’s cheating.
*The Class Rules for the Collegiate Dinghy Class allow ooching, but only in surfing conditions.
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