Answer to Leeward Mark Rules Quiz

It's been a week since I posted the leeward mark question, so I think we've received all the answers we'll probably get.. If you haven't read the preceding post and responses by John, Hans and me, you'll need to do so, to understand this follow-up post.

John says: X breaks no rule, A breaks rules 11 (windward/leeeward) and 18.2 (mark-room) with respect to X, and Y is exonerated for breaking those same rules, plus rule 31 (touching a mark) because she was taking room to which she is entitled.

This was, in fact, the call made on the water and was my original opinion, as well.

Hans agreed with this in his first comment, but in his last comment, some doubt creeps in. 'It is not quite clear from the drawing if Y [gives] mark room to X,' he says.

And that's where the other umpires discussing this call finally ended up. It's a well-established principle of the RRS that a boat's obligation to give mark-room is not restricted to the boat right alongside her, but applies to any boat affected by her behavior. For example, if there are 5 boats coming into a leeward mark side by side, all of them overlapped for a long time beforehand, and the outside boat crowds in so that the innermost boat can't pass the mark on its required side, we DSQ that outside boat even though she isn't in the zone. She was overlapped with the inside boat when the latter entered the zone and thus, owes her mark-room.

In the present case, X entered the zone clear ahead of Y, so Y owes her mark-room. Because X cannot sail her proper course when Y goes in between A and the mark, Y breaks rule 18.2. Y was not compelled to go between X and the mark, so she's not exonerated under rule 64.1(a).

Final answer: DSQ both A and Y.

But this raises an interesting additional question: At some point X is no longer rounding the mark and thus is no longer entitled to mark-room under rule 18.2 (see my post, 'When does rule 18 turn off?'). Or, suppose X's course is above her course to the next mark (which, according to the facts, is off to the right somewhere)? Then A and Y don't break rule 18 with respect to X. A still breaks rule 11 (Windward/Leeward) with respect to X, but Y doesn't. So NOW do we exonerate Y?

The answer is “no”, and the reason is rule 19. As a leeward boat, X is an obstruction to both A and Y. When A and Y become overlapped to windward of X, the outside boat Y owes the inside boat A room to pass the obstruction X. She could have easily given that room by passing the wrong side of the mark, so by “going in there” she voluntarily breaks rule 19. No exoneration under rule 21 for that, and none under rule 64.1(a), either. So the answer is the same: DSQ A for failing to keep clear of X and DSQ Y for not giving A room to pass X.

If we back away from the specific rules for a moment, we see that this is the answer we'd like to get. Neither A nor Y had any rights in there with respect to X, who was both a leeward boat and entitled to mark-room, and neither of them were compelled to go between X and the mark. So we'd expect them to both be DSQ'ed, and that's what we're going to do.

Leeward Mark Rules Quiz

Here's a scenario that came up at an umpire debrief at the 2014 Hinman, which is the US Team Race National Championship.  Simple as it seems, it had the sailors and umpires discussing what rules applied for hours after the debrief.  And again the next morning.

Even after the event was over, several of the umpires, including some International Umpires and International Judges, continued to chew over the call via e-mail.  Finally, several of them wrote it up and submitted it to ISAF as a proposed Team Race Rapid Response Call.

X and Y were on the same team and A was on the opposing team. The incident happened at mark 3 of a digital N course, meaning that the next mark was off to the right, a little to windward of the direction X is headed at position 4.  X entered the zone clear ahead of A and Y, who were overlapped at the zone with Y inside A.  Boat A took a course to pass between X and the mark, and Y went in with her. There was contact between all three boats and Y hit the mark. There was a valid protest. What should the call have been?

This time, rather than giving my opinion I'm asking yours.  You can decide there was no foul, or that one or more boats should have taken a penalty.  The hard part is, you have to say why -- who, if anybody, broke what rules and who, if anybody, should have been exonerated under rules 21 or 64.1(a). 

In case you don't know much about team racing, I think it doesn't matter.  The only special team-race rule that might apply here is that in team racing, boats can break rules with respect to their own team-mates, but only if there is no contact and the incident didn't involve the other team.  In this case there was contact and the incident clearly involved both teams, so that rule didn't apply.  So the answer should be the same in fleet racing as in team racing.

I'll give you one hint:  It's more complicated than it might seem at first, and X is an obstruction to the other two boats (see the definition Obstruction). 

In my next post, I'll tell you what the august body of Hinman umpires finally decided!

Play 17 and the Shake and Bake

This post stems from a conversation I had with a coach at a team-race event.  The coach was complaining about a bunch of calls his team never seemed to get in their favor.  Naturally, he wondered how we umpires could screw up so badly.  From my experience and his description of what the sailors were doing, I don’t think we screwed up, at least not most of the time.  I told him I think the play, which I'll call Play 17, is a high-risk, low-profit move. 

The play is designed for Blue to break a trap at Mark 3, and goes as follows: Yellow sets a trap by waiting on starboard tack near the mark.  Blue approaches the mark on starboard tack and A forces her to go right, looking downwind.  (Recall that rule 18.4, which would normally prohibit Yellow from sailing farther from the mark than her proper course before jibing, is deleted in team racing.)  Yellow wants to drive Blue far enough away, and for long enough, to allow a teammate through or at least to slow the race.  Blue, on the other hand, wants to force Yellow to return to the mark and round it.  So Blue luffs up sharply (maybe even head to wind) at position 3, to break the overlap and put Yellow clear astern.  When she bears off again the overlap is re-established, but now rule 17 applies.  This means Yellow must bear away onto her proper course, which takes her back to the mark. 

The animation above shows Play 17 working about as well as Blue could hope for.  Once the overlap is reestablished at position 4, Yellow is forced to bear off onto a run.  She then must jibe back to the mark to avoid sailing out of the zone and having Blue establish mark-room on her, and  Blue follows her.  Note that Blue carefully avoids overlapping to windward of Yellow because then Yellow would have the right to luff Blue again, and without mark-room Blue cannot go between Yellow and the mark.

On the face of it, this seems like a good play.  A variation is even shown in Team Race Call  J6.  So, why, in the dozens of times I’ve seen this play, has it worked maybe twice? 

Well, for a bunch of reasons:

1.       About 60% of the time (my fellow umps, in an informal poll the other day, said 80%), Blue never actually breaks the overlap.  Thus when she bears off again, rule 17 still applies and she’s accomplished nothing except to waste time, which of course is her opponent’s objective.  

2.       Another 10% of the time, the umps don’t happen to be exactly lined up to see Blue break the overlap, and as a result don’t credit her with doing so.  (Look at how marginally Blue breaks the overlap in the scenario above, even though she luffs above close hauled to do it, and imagine how precisely the umpire boat would have to be, to see that the overlap is broken.)

3.       Even when Blue has broken the overlap she frequently hails Yellow to take her proper course before the overlap is reestablished, then protests her for not doing so.  Of course, at that moment there is no overlap so rule 17 doesn’t apply and Yellow doesn’t have to do anything.  So the umps green-flag it. This is particularly a problem for Blue because she may think the green and white flag is because the umps never saw her break the overlap.

4.       Even if all goes well, Blue doesn't gain much.  Yellow’s proper course limitation doesn’t begin until the overlap is re-established, and even then she only has to turn in a kind of lazy curve back toward the mark – an abrupt turn is slow, and therefore not her proper course.  By the time she finally jibes back to the mark, her objective has generally been accomplished.  

What we umpires see all the time is that when Yellow doesn’t bear off onto a proper course because she doesn't think the overlap was broken, Blue forces the issue by bearing off or, worse, jibing.  At that point she’s failing to keep clear (under rule 11 if she only bears off, and under rule 10 if she jibes onto port tack).  So she ends up with a penalty.  If she protests Yellow under rule 17 the two penalties are likely to result in the same relative positions as at the outset, only with a huge delay for the spins.  Again, this is what Yellow was trying to accomplish in the first place.

Worse, there's a good counterplay, first told to me by Charles Higgins, a sailing coach at Old Dominion University.  He calls it (for no reason known to me) the "Shake and Bake".

The Shake and Bake is really easy: Yellow simply doesn't let Blue reestablish the overlap without fouling.  When Blue luffs up, Yellow stays below her, clear astern and aimed just inches from the port side of Blue’s transom.  Now Blue can't bear off and reestablish the overlap without immediately breaking rule 11 (or, worse, jibing and breaking rule 10). Note that it doesn’t matter whether Yellow leaves the zone, because she has right of way when Blue reestablishes the overlap.  Also, rule 15 doesn’t apply because Blue establishes the overlap by bearing off.

Yellow’s obligation under rule 17 doesn’t begin until the overlap is re-established, which is approximately when the foul occurs.  Of course, Yellow avoids actual contact with Blue, bears off and protests.  If she wins the protest, she gains a huge advantage.  If not, she has still wasted a fair amount of time and therefore accomplished her purpose.

So if Play 17 isn't much good, what should Blue have done when Yellow set the trap?  Depending on the circumstances, she has three options that are better than Play 17.

First, she could have avoided the original overlap by jibing at position 2, going astern of Yellow and jibing back.  This is effective if the next blue boat is on the left looking downwind, or if Yellow has a teammate coming in on the right.  Sitting behind Blue, Yellow is in a position to prevent any member of the other team rounding the mark astern of Yellow, and if Yellow sails too far from the mark, Blue can quickly jibe around the mark and be ahead of her.

Second, if Yellow is trying to help a yellow teammate get ahead of Blue, Blue could turn back against that opponent and hold her back, using the same play Yellow is using on her (i.e., she should apply the Golden Rule of team racing -- do unto your opponents as they are trying to do unto you).

Third, there’s a better play that works especially well if the boats are keelboats:  at position 3, Blue tacks and turns hard toward the mark.  Yellow is at that point outside Blue's line and cannot force her starboard-tack advantage without breaking rule 16.1.  If Yellow tries to jibe out, she almost always has to leave the zone, so now Blue has mark-room.  If Yellow tacks, she loses mark-room and is now astern of Blue.

The reason this tacking play works particularly well in keelboats is that when Blue luffs up she develops good rotational moment into the tack.  By the time Yellow bears off to jibe around, Blue has the advantage.  But the tacking play works even for dinghies -- Charles says he has conducted tests that show the tacking play to be an effective play for Blue even in 420’s and FJs, as long as Yellow heads up to approximately a beam reach, or above.