Greetings CMYC members,
Today was a lovely sailing breeze, neither was it cold for being one day past the shortest day…..so from now on we are on the home straight to summer…….. spare a kind thought for those in the northern hemisphere, they are on a downhill slide to winter tsk, tsk. Today I heard lots of protests and saw lots of exonerations, so that is good, I also heard lots of wrong calls from boats having to tack at obstructions. More on that later.
Darryl Sutton was RO assisted by Nick Richardson. They set a nice long start line suitable for the mass start, and it was true to the NE wind, so congratulations race committee. We had a 2 lap course of good length and I enjoyed todays sailing…..not because of any spectacular results, but in spite of the lack thereof. It grieved me to have to alter on the computer, 276 wrong position of about 12th, up to 4th…..mutter, mutter, grrr.
I do applaud the podium finishers, Graham Parratt, Peter Bradley and Glen Church……of course they were just lucky the rest of us didn’t beat them.
Now a little about the aforementioned wrong hails. These were all hailed when a boat was sailing close-hauled into the side of the lake and that boat needed to tack away off the shore, a safety manoeuvre. I heard a variety of hails but the most common one was “tacking for water”. First we must realise that the RRS do not put the onus on boats to anticipate what another competitor might do, and if the hail is wrong don’t expect any leniency from the arbitrators or protest committee if it goes to a hearing. These incidents are covered under RRS 20, ROOM TO TACK AT AN OBSTRUCTION, but the radio sailing hail is changed specifically to E1.3 (b) “ Hails under rules 20.1 and 20.3 shall include the words ‘room’ and ‘tack’ and the sail number of the hailing boat, in any order”.