"Promptly" in the context of Mark-Room

 

I was asked recently by some team-racing umpires, when a boat entitled to mark-room stops while rounding a mark, is she still entitled to mark-room?  The question arises naturally in team racing, where boats commonly slow or stop in order to impede their opponents, but the question is equally valid in fleet and match racing.  The issue comes down to the mysterious word "promptly" in the definition Room, a word that is used in the definition Mark-Room.  The significance of "promptly" in the context of mark-room was introduced to me by Dick Rose, 20 years or so ago, and I never felt the need to address the issue because, in my experience, the problem never occurred.  But now that it has, I'd like to address it.

The definition Room  says (emphasis added):

Room The space a boat needs in the existing conditions, including space to comply with her obligations under the rules of Part 2 and rule 31, while manoeuvring  promptly in a seamanlike way.

The definition of Mark-Room says:

Mark-Room Room for a boat

(a) (b) (c)

to sail to the mark when her proper course is to sail close to it, to round or pass the mark on the required side, and to leave it astern.

Because the definition Mark-Room uses the term Room, we can put the two definitions together to get something like this (emphasis added):

Mark-Room The space a boat needs in the existing conditions, including space to comply with her obligations under the rules of Part 2 and rule 31, to do the following promptly in a seamanlike way:

(a) (b) (c)

sail to the mark when her proper course is to sail close to it, round or pass the mark on the required side, and leave it astern.

What does "promptly" mean in this context?  If Yellow reaches the zone of a port-rounding  leeward mark several boatlengths clear ahead of Blue, she is entitled to mark-room (see rule 18.2(a)).  Suppose that, instead of sailing promptly to the mark, Yellow stops -- maybe her spinnaker drops into the water, or maybe she's team racing and wants to slow her opponent, Blue (see the animation below).  Does she thereby lose the right to mark-room?  

Certainly that's not how we generally interpret the rule.  In team racing, that interpretation would effectively prohibit mark traps.  

But now suppose Blue enters the zone and approaches Yellow.  Yellow sails down past the mark, jibes onto port tack and stops (see diagram below).  Blue is on starboard tack and needs to take avoiding action.  Should Yellow take a penalty?

 

 

 

 I think the answer is yes.  When Yellow stopped earlier, with no other boats around, she was not sailing within the mark-room to which she was entitled because she was not sailing to the mark promptly.  But that didn't matter because she didn't need mark-room -- Blue was far behind and Yellow did not need room to do what she was doing, nor did she need exoneration for breaking a rule of Section A or rules 15 or 16 (see rule 43.1(b)).  But now, at the moment when Blue must take avoiding action, if Yellow is not promptly sailing to the mark, or sailing to round the mark and leave it astern, she is not sailing within the mark-room to which she is entitled and this time it does matter, because she is breaking rule 10. The rules are always interpreted on a moment-to-moment basis, so when Yellow breaks rule 10 and is not doing at least one of the things listed in (a)-(c) of the definition Mark-Room promptly, she is not exonerated under rule 43.1(b).  In the incident shown, penalize Yellow.

When does rule 18 turn off?

A question I hear often is "When does rule 18 turn off?"  At the simplest level, the answer is given by rule 18.1:

18.1 When Rule 18 Applies
        Rule 18 applies between boats when they are required to leave a mark on the same side and at
        least  one of them is in the zone.
        However, it does not apply
             (a) between boats on opposite tacks on a beat to windward,
             (b) between boats on opposite tacks when the proper course at the mark for one but
                   not both of them is to tack,
             (c) between a boat approaching a mark and one leaving it, or
             (d) if the mark is a continuing obstruction, in which case rule 19 applies.

If rule 18 does apply at some point during a mark rounding, part (d) clearly never applied.  Condition (b) is really just an extension of (a) for situations where there might be disagreement about whether boats are on a beat to windward, so we get the following summary: "Rule 18 turns off when either boat tacks at a mark to be rounded on its windward side, and when the leading boat leaves the mark while the other boat is still approaching it."

However, that's not the whole story.  The real question is, "When does the obligation to give mark-room end?"  And while that seems like the first question, it's actually quite different.  Basically, the obligation to give mark-room ends when the boat entitled to mark-room no longer needs it to pass or round the mark. 

Consider ISAF Q&A 2013-017.The animation at the left was used to draw the scenario in that Q&A; it shows two catamarans rounding a port-rounding offset mark, with the next leg directly downwind, in 10-12 knots of wind, no current.  At position 4 Yellow has passed the mark and both boats are on their downwind courses (which, they being catamarans, is not straight downwind).  Yellow jibes directly in front of Blue, breaking rule 10 (Port/Starboard).

Blue is required to give Yellow mark-room at this mark because Yellow is clear ahead at the zone.  According to the definition Mark-room, Blue has to give Yellow three things:

1. Room to sail to the mark if her proper course is close to it;
2. Room to round the mark as required to sail the course; and
3. Room to leave the mark on its required side.

(I've changed the order of the requirements in the definition Mark-room so that they appear in time order, making them easier to discuss here.)

Consider the situation at position 4 of the animation.   Yellow's proper course is no longer close to the mark, so she no longer has the right to room to sail to it.  She is on her downwind starboard-tack course, so she has rounded the mark as required to sail the course.  And Blue has clearly given her room to leave the mark on its required side. Thus, Blue's obligation to give Yellow mark-room has been discharged and she is no longer obliged to do so.

That conclusion is particularly important because of rule 18.2(c)(2), which says:

(c) When a boat is required to give mark-room by rule 18.2(b),
      (1) she shall continue to do so even if later an overlap is broken or a new overlap begins;
      (2) if she becomes overlapped inside the boat entitled to mark-room, she shall also give
            that boat room to sail her proper course while they remain overlapped.

At position 4, Blue has become overlapped inside Yellow.  But because Blue has discharged her obligation to give Yellow mark-room, she is no longer required to do so and the initial phrase in rule 18.2(c) does not apply to her.  Therefore rule 18.2(c)(2) does not apply.  Yellow's breach of rule 10 is not exonerated under rule 21 and she should do her turns.

 Now consider a situation at a port-rounding leeward mark, with the next leg a beam reach (as with Mark 3 in a standard digital-N course in team racing). Blue is overlapped when she enters the zone, so she is required to give Yellow mark-room.  By luffing Yellow at positions 3-4, does she break rule 18?

I think the answer is no.  Refer again to the list of requirements from the definition Mark-room.  Blue has certainly given Yellow room to sail to the mark, and just after position 3 Yellow is on her course to the next mark, so she has been given room to round it.  At position 4 Yellow  has not yet passed the mark on its required side, but Blue is not preventing her from doing so.  Thus unless Blue luffs Yellow into the mark she has given mark-room as defined and has no further obligations.  

Note that this isn't as clear-cut as the previous example because not all the conditions of the definition Mark-room have been met when Blue luffs Yellow above her course to the next mark: Blue still has to allow Yellow to leave the mark on its required side.   So one could argue that until all the parts of the definition have been met, Blue has no right to interfere with Yellow.  But I don't think that conclusion is supported by the wording of rule 18 and the definition Mark-room.

If I'm right, this has an interesting consequence for team-racing: it essentially allows the outside boat to set a "post-mark trap" at Mark 3.  Suppose Blue has a team-mate close astern; then this play allows that team-mate to pass while Blue holds up Yellow.  You might say, Blue could have accomplished this by luffing later, along the leg, and that may be true -- but it may not, because if Blue allows Yellow to trim in and reach along the next leg, she may lose any real opportunity to luff Yellow above close-hauled, which she needs to do if she wants to hold Yellow up.  It's only the presence of the mark that forced Yellow to come down into the vulnerable position she's in at position 4. 

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.