Don't Apply Part-2 Rules to the Wrong Boat

 

I’ve had a series of rules discussions with various people in the last few weeks, in which I’ve heard a common theme: They think that wording in a rule that applies to one boat in an incident somehow applies to the other boat, as well. The fact is, except for rule 14, Avoiding Contact, each numbered rule of Part 2, When Boats Meet, speaks to only one boat -- there is nothing the other boat can do, that breaks that rule.

This misunderstanding seems to happen mainly when it comes to the rules about giving room, in Sections B and C of Part 2.  For example, consider rule 18.2:

18.2 Giving Mark-Room

        (a) When boats are overlapped the outside boat shall give the inside boat mark-room, unless rule 18.2(b) applies.

        (b)  If boats are overlapped when the first of them reaches the zone, the outside boat at that moment shall
               thereafter give the inside boat mark-room. If a boat is clear ahead when she reaches the zone, the boat
               clear astern at that moment shall thereafter give her mark-room.

        (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.

The rule goes on from there, but (a)-(c) are the salient parts, for the purpose of this discussion.  Note that this entire rule restricts the behavior of only one boat -- the one required to give mark-room.  It does not restrict the behavior of the other boat.

Consider the following scenario (see the animation below).  Boat IW enters the zone of a leeward mark to be left to port overlapped inside boat OL.  As they approach the mark, IW sails an approach for a “wide then tight” rounding, rather than sailing directly to the mark, which is what she is entitled to room to do (see the definition Mark-Room).  OL sails alongside her while hailing “Hey!  You’re taking too much room!”  OL protests, alleging that IW broke rule 18.2(b); but the protest committee denies the protest.   

 

What was the protest committee thinking?  Well, according to rule 18.2(b), OL must give mark-room to IW; the rule says nothing about what IW might or might not do.  Put another way, there’s no rule against “taking too much room”.  So in order to be disqualified, IW would have  to break some other rule, and since she was the keep-clear boat, that means she would have to fail to keep clear under rule 11, Overlapped on the Same Tack.

This takes us to the definition of Keep Clear, which says, “A boat keeps clear of a right-of-way boat (a) if the right-of-way boat can sail her course with no need to take avoiding action, and, (b) when the boats are overlapped, if the right-of-way boat can also change course in both directions without immediately making contact.”  Did OL ever have to take avoiding action?  No; she simply sailed her course alongside IW.  Did the boats ever come close enough that OL could not change course without immediate contact?  Again, no.  So IW broke no rule.

This is sometimes referred to as “room freely given”, using the words of World Sailing Case 114, but, with apologies to the Casebook writers, I think it’s a mistake to use that expression.  I think that, to the extent possible, we should not create concepts that aren’t in the rules themselves.  The same Case could have come to the same conclusion by simply stating that the boat required to give room did so and the other boat broke no rule.

If OL wants to protest IW, she must force the issue by luffing slowly, giving IW room to keep clear of her.  If IW does not respond by changing course to sail directly to the mark, and OL has to bear off to avoid hitting her, then OL can protest IW for breaking rule 11 -- OL had to take avoiding action.  IL is not exonerated under rule 43 because she didn’t begin sailing a course directly to the mark until after position 3, when she had already broken rule 11. 

Note that if one boat's behavior is restricted under one rule and the other boat must keep clear under another rule, both rules still apply.  In particular, the keep-clear boat is not freed from her obligation to keep clear (though she will be exonerated if she sails within the room to which she is entitled).  A good example of this is rule 17, On the Same Tack; Proper Course.  That rule says that under certain conditions, when a boat establishes an overlap to leeward of another boat from clear astern she shall not sail above her proper course.  Rule 17 only refers to the proper course of the leeward boat – it says nothing about the course of the windward boat, and it does not free the windward boat of her obligation under rule 11, Overlapped on the Same Tack, to keep clear.  So, for example, if the leeward boat carries an asymmetrical spinnaker and the windward boat carries a symmetrical one, the course the windward boat will have to sail to keep clear under rule 11, Overlapped on the Same Tack, is usually going to be much higher than her proper course, even if the leeward boat obeys rule 17.  In the scenario below, Yellow could not change course to windward at position 3 without making immediate contact, so Blue breaks rule 11.

Here’s another example, from an incident a couple of weeks ago, in which a boat thought wrongly that a rule applying to her also limited the other boat.  WS and LP were sailing downwind on port tack, with WS overlapped to windward of LP (see scenario, below).  WS jibed onto starboard and the boats converged.  LP held her course until WS had to bear off to avoid contact.  Then LP jibed away and there was no further incident. 

 

LP protested WS under rule 15, Acquiring Right of Way, which says, “When a boat acquires right of way, she shall initially give the other boat room to keep clear, unless she acquires right of way because of the other boat’s actions.” 

The first issue here is whether WS initially gave LP room to keep clear.  In the discussion, I asked LP whether she had kept clear after WS jibed, and she replied “Yes.”  I asked her whether she had done anything unseamanlike, and she said she hadn’t.  So I asked her how she could claim WS hadn’t given her room to keep clear, when she had kept clear and in a seamanlike manner.  She said, “When WS jibed, she had to let me sail my course without taking avoiding action.  That’s what the definition of Keep Clear says.  And because I had to jibe away, she broke that rule.” 

I think she got that definition backwards.  As we saw earlier, the definition Keep Clear speaks only about the right-of-way boat taking avoiding action.  LP was, from position 3, the keep-clear boat, so the definition doesn’t say anything about whether she was needed to take avoiding action; she needed to do whatever it took, in a seamanlike way, to keep clear.

The second issue is whether LP herself broke any rules.  In my opinion, LP broke rule 11.  It’s true that LP didn’t have to begin to take action until position 2 to keep clear – there’s no requirement in the rules to anticipate a change in right of way – but she does have to begin to take action immediately when WS's mainsail crosses her center-line, just before position 2.  These particular boats were about 21’ long and traveling at about 6 knots, so they would sail a boatlength every 6 seconds or so;  that means LP sailed something like 20 seconds before she jibed.  20 seconds seems to me to be a very delayed reaction. (If you don’t believe that, imagine the skipper of LP saying "Jibing!" at position 2 and count out 20 seconds while visualizing the action aboard LP as they prepared to jibe.)  So, to my mind, LP broke rule 10, On Opposite Tacks.   

There’s one additional fact in this scenario that would, I believe, have helped a protest committee decide to penalize LP: the boats were only 5 or 6 boatlengths from the finish line and WS was on the layline to the starboard end of that line (see diagram below).  One of the things judges must do in considering the evidence is to understand the tactical significance of the boats' actions; this is one reason why it’s so important for judges to have extensive racing experience.  In this case, there’s an easy explanation for LP’s failure to respond to WS’s jibe: she wanted to get to the finish line without having to jibe twice.  That’s not conclusive evidence, of course, that she didn’t respond promptly to WS’s jibe; but it would help the protest committee determine the credibility of LP’s claim that she needed all that time to prepare to jibe.

 

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.