Correction to 'More about Redress'

In my last posting, I said about the second Farah Hall prescription, "Basically, it allows a disgruntled loser from a protest hearing to demand a new hearing, ..." This is not true.  Rule 62.1(a) allows requests for redress for improper actions by protest committees, but adds: "but not by a protest committee decision when the boat was a party to the hearing." So the disgruntled sailor has to be from a boat that was not party to the hearing.  This still allows a boat to take two bites from the apple if she wasn't a party to the original hearing, but at least she can't take a third and fourth bite.

I apologize for the error.

More About Redress

Since my last post on the subject of redress, I’ve received several comments from people I’ve met at regattas, agreeing with me that we should get rid of redress. Maybe there’s more support for this idea than I thought, though of course people who think I’m crazy probably don’t bring it up. If you think we should get rid of redress and be like every other sport in simply accepting unlucky breaks, let people know about it!

In the last post I covered the most common reason for requesting redress – actions or non-actions by race committees, protest committees, organizing authorities, and the like. 

In this post we’ll look at the other reasons a boat might request redress. 
 
Rule 62.1 (b)-(d) says a boat may request redress because of:

     (b) injury or physical damage because of the action of a boat that was breaking a rule
           of   Part 2 or of a vessel not racing that was required to keep clear;

     (c) giving help (except to herself or her crew) in compliance with rule 1.1; or 

     (d) an action of a boat, or a member of her crew, that resulted in a penalty under 
           rule 2 or a penalty or warning under rule 69.2(c).
 
Like the rest of rule 62.1, part (b) seems fair on the face of it; but not so fast. The problem with fairness here is that boats that are fouled in such a way that they lose a huge number of places are not eligible for redress unless there was damage, whereas boats that are damaged in perhaps insignificant ways can claim the damage was what hurt their finishing position, and get redress. Rule 62.1(b) does not require that the damage be substantial, the way rules 44.1(b) (taking a penalty) or 60.3(a) (protest committee hearing a protest that would have otherwise been invalid) do. 
 
On the other hand, rule 62.1 requires that the boat’s score was made significantly worse by the damage itself, not just by the incident. So if boat port-tacks you just after the start and puts a hole in your side and it takes 2 minutes to get the boats apart, can you claim redress for that delay? Reading the rule carefully, I'd say not; but I'll bet most protest committees would say otherwise. If the damage keeps you from sailing on starboard tack until you can duct-tape the hole shut, that’s clearly redressable. 

Rule 62.1(c) and (d) are the most defensible part of the redress rule, but the situations these parts describe are so rare that most sailors can go their entire lives without the events listed in this rule even happening.
 
There's one other thing about redress we need to look at. Some years ago, US Sailing instituted the “Farah Hall” prescriptions, so called because they were pressed upon US Sailing by Farah Hall, who was prevented from being selected to the US Olympic Team because of an incident in the Olympic Trials for the 2008 Games (she subsequently windsurfed her way onto the team for the 2012 Games). One of the Farah Hall prescriptions, to rule 60, deals with redress. It says, 
 

US Sailing prescribes that when redress has been requested or is to be considered, the protest committee shall make a reasonable attempt to notify all boats of the time and place of the hearing and the nature of the request or the grounds for considering redress. Before holding the hearing, the committee shall allow reasonable time for boats to make written requests to participate.

When we first wrote this prescription, I was of two minds about it – on the face of it the prescription seems fair, but it looked as if it could cause huge hassles for the protest committee. Suppose everybody in a big fleet decides to participate? The redress hearing could become unmanageable. But now that the prescription has been around for awhile and is in wide use across the country, I've changed my mind. The general experience I've heard about is that usually almost nobody takes advantage of the opportunity to attend the hearing, and even if lots of people show up for the hearing, a good protest committee can control the process so it doesn’t get out of hand.

The reason I like the prescription is that hearings are essentially adversarial processes, with the protest committee hearing both sides of the argument and deciding the outcome. For example, when there's a protest both the protestor and protestee are parties to the hearing, so both sides of the incident are presented. I can't tell you how many times I've thought the protestor had an open and shut case after she presented her side, only to discover that the protestee's presentation and witnesses cast the entire incident in a different light.

In the case of redress hearings, without the prescription above, usually the only person in the room who stands to gain or lose by the decision is the applicant. It's true that when the redress is brought under rule 62.1(a), the race officer or whoever is claimed to have done an improper act is a party, but nobody really speaks for all those boats that, if the redress is granted, will have lower scores for the event. In the case of requests for redress under rules 61.(b)-(d), there's nobody in the room to say, "Wait a minute.  That kind of damage doesn't really hurt a boat of this type,"  or "I saw them pick up the crew member that had fallen off her boat.  I punched my stopwatch and it was 3-1/2 minutes before she was returned to her original boat, not the 10 minutes claimed by the boat requesting redress."
 
So it makes sense to alert all boats about the redress request and the reasons given in it (usually, by simply posting a copy of the request on the Official Notice Board), so that anybody who may be hurt by the decision can oppose the request. 
 
The only really onerous effect of this prescription is to delay the hearing, and I think that can be taken care of through shorter protest time limits (or maybe a separate, shorter time limit for redress requests) accompanied by electronic communication of the required notice and the requests to be present. 
 
I don't have the same good feeling about the second Farah Hall redress prescription, which is to rule 63.4:

(b) [when practicable] a request for redress based on a protest committee decision shall be heard by a committee that contains no members of the committee that made the original decision.

Personally, I think this prescription is nuts. Basically, it allows a disgruntled loser from a protest hearing to demand a new hearing, and Rule 63.1 requires that once the request if submitted, there has to be a hearing. If there are any judges in the area who weren't on the original protest committee, a new committee must be formed that has no overlapping membership with the old one. And if the request for redress is worded cleverly, the new committee must essentially conduct an entirely new hearing. This gives the loser a “second bite of the apple”, which is distinctly unfair. In my opinion, if the sore loser really believes there were errors or the protest committee simply got the rules wrong, she can appeal. 
 

In cases where new evidence becomes available or the protest committee realizes that they have made a serious error, the loser of the original protest hearing or the protest committee itself can ask that the hearing be reopened so that the new evidence can be heard or the decision can be rethought. In such cases, rule 66 specifies that the panel for the rehearing have a majority of members from the original protest committee – exactly the opposite of the Farah Hall requirement. 
 

Note that the Farah Hall prescriptions can be written out, either individually or in toto, by the sailing instructions. I understand that there are entire areas of the country where it is the custom to do so. But I suggest that before you do this, you should put some careful thought into the value of these prescriptions, not just into the negatives – and I urge you to keep the prescription to rule 60. 
 

Alternatively, you could simply write out redress, altogether. Rule 62 is one of the rules that can be modified by sailing instructions (see rule 86.1). So organizers could simply put the following rule in their sailing instructions:

“SI n. Rule 62 is deleted.”

There might be people who love redress hearings and won't come to your event if they don't have an opportunity to file for redress, so you'd better include this change in the Notice of Race, too.

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.