Fun and games on the course and in the room

Yesterday saw very similar weather to the day before, with light winds and flat water in the first race and about 15 to 18 knots in the second with seas that built up to a metre or so.

Unfortunately, despite the conditions in the first race favouring us, we were badly buried by other boats at the start and could never recover from a position near the back of the fleet. We had great racing with the boats around us, particularly in the final beat where we had a series of crosses with the teenagers in the Classic boat Ffiesty and managed to edge them out at the finish, but we just couldn't do anything to catch up the ones that had got ahead of us on the first beat.

The second race took a long time to get under way, with the fleet pushing over the line early time after time. Even with the black flag in use, the race committee had to either postpone before the start or give a general recall three times before we finally got away. Sadly they didn't disqualify as many boats as it would have taken to get the fleet under control, so I suspect the starts won't get any easier for them or for us.

We ended up close to the front row but not actually in it, not wanting to take chances under a black flag with no sight of our transits in the seconds leading up to the start signal. Still, it was a reasonable position and we were about mid-fleet when we got towards the top mark. There was some drama there: we were approaching the mark on starboard with another boat to leeward, when a third boat tried to cross in front on port tack and tack over to head to the mark. They didn't see us at first, and then tacked right in front of us, forcing us to avoid them. We protested, but they didn't do any penalty turns. As the race continued we slipped back a little in the fleet and ended up in the high sixties: not a great result but better than the first race of the day. Once again we found the waves hard work and ended up carrying a fair bit of water ballast, which doesn't do much for the boat speed!

When we got ashore, I lodged a protest against the boat which had tacked in front of us. The procedure when rules are allegedly broken is that a panel of rules experts listen to both sides of the story and then determine whether or not a rule has been broken. The penalty for breaking a rule is normally disqualification from the race, whereas the rule-breaker does have the option of taking a penalty on the water at the time of the incident by sailing clear of the other boats and turning two full turns. So, when someone does break a rule there's a gamble between taking the penalty and definitely dropping a number of places or taking your chance on being able to convince the jury of your innocence. The protest itself is like a trial in court, with the protestor presenting their case, and being questioned by first the protestee and then the jury, and then the protestee presenting their case and being questioned by the protestor and the jury. Then witnesses can be called, asked to describe their version of what happened and then questioned by both parties and the jury, followed by summing-up by protestor and protestee. I've been involved in a few protests over the years, but I evidently still have some learning to do, as I didn't manage to present my case in a way to convince the jury, and they decided that no rule had been broken. Still, it was all good experience and I will try not to make the same mistake again.