Class Politics Postponing and the Crappy Rules

[gouvernail]

When an on the water postponement is in effect, the rules are clear. The committee can drop the red and white flag at any time and six minutes later a race can start.
If the wind is blowing and the reason for the postponement was a need to simply "press the reset button" the six minute total time to the next start is about right. The fleet reorganizes, the gun sounds, the red and white drops and a minute later another start sequence begins.

But that is not the problem.

The problem is the light air day when the entire game holds it breath while we all wait for some wind to start. Eventually, the committee makes some movements, fires a horn, and six minutes later we actually try to start.

But...

How often is that the entire fleet is struggling just to get to anyplace at all on the line. There is no time for most of the fleet to get line sights, check for a favored end, plan an approach and jockey with the rest of the players for a position on the line.
The fact is, six minutes in no where near enough time to plan and execute a start.

The worst case is where many of the sailors find themselves too far from the line to make the start at all. Their race ( and the race of those who enjoy playing with them) is ruined.

I think race committees want to have great races and time for playing the entire game before the start is absolutely part of the racing they want to manage.

So...How do we cause, "Will everybody have enough time to actually play the game?" consideration to be part of what race committees ALWAYS consider when coming out of postponement??

I believe world wide consistency in race management must be available and extra time before a start when the committee comes out of postponement should be internationally considered.

So how??

 

[slalomskier]

I have had a bad experience with this problem. At the junior olympic festival in newport last year, there was NO wind. We were all sitting around in our boats, drifting away, when they started the race. I was not far from the line at all, but in the middle of the bay. The current did not allow me to get to the start in time, and me and about 5 other lasers started about 5 minutes late, when two people who were towed to the line started ontime. The rule is kind of sick. we should make it so they can only start a new race once every boat hails the commity boat on starbord tack before the restart.

 

[gouvernail]

Your check in after postpone rule is just a tad to much "rule" for my taste but I do appreciate the general concept. Certainly we need to have the RC understand the need for competitor to not only have time to get to the line but to fully play the pre start game once that competitor arrives.

Part of sailing, A HUGE part, is jockeying for position for the great start. We cannot have good racing if all we have time to do is grab a spot and go.

I like your check in idea because:
The committee should be considering "what is enough time?" My answer would be, "If everybody would have time to sail by the transome of the committee boat, check in, get a line sight, sail to the middle of the line decide which end to use for winning the race sail to that end, find a place in the fleet, win it, and begin the race."

I don't care if we just sat in postponement for three hours and the wind is just barely filling and we need one race to get a regatta....if the race is only possible with a totally crap start game, the quality race didn't happen and the resulting junk race should not count.

So...How do we get the wonderful folks who spent tons of effort learning to manage races and teaching others to manage races to realize this issue is important and to do something to make situations like the one your endured a thing of the past???

I am looking for a way to team up with the race management community and solve the problem.

Rabble rousing a bit here is jusat a tune up for the next step...If we can gigure out just what that constructive next step should be.

 

[49208]

There always seem to be two types of RC's - those that like to communicate with the racers (Peter Reggio is a great example of this type) and those that like to be silent and do everything "by the book" with flags and signals...

Those that like to communicate can broadcast out via loud hailer their intentions to drop the AP in xx minutes (5, 10, 20, 30 etc) and also send patrol boats out to the fringes of the course to do the same. I remember a New England Masters regatta a couple years ago where they did this. It was really helpful as a few of the old farts had actually fallen asleep and didn't even notice the RC had moved the course a mile away from the old starting line! (I plead the 5th)

So IMHO, if the RC is there to serve the racers, they should communicate their intentions well in advance.

If the RC can't be convinced to communicate and is going to be silent and go "by the book", special emphasis should be made of this fact at the skippers meeting and perhaps the sailing instructions as well, so that those competitors that have a tendency to forget important things like not getting too far away from the starting line in light air are gently reminded and can hopefully adjust/change.

Eric R at Cedar Point would have some good ideas on this..

 

[computeroman2]

This reminds me of a passage from a wonderful book I received (used) from my dad's bookshelf, called Thoughts on Small Boat Racing by C. Stanley Ogilvy (on that note, I would certainly recommend this book- it has many thoughts on the mental aspect of sailing). The particular passage was about the time limit rule versus the shorten-the-course rule, but the same mentality mentioned there applies here. (note- the rules are from the '60's, so the wording may be different now.)
Quote:
"This brings me to a point...Rule 5, 1 (b) says, in part, "The race committee...may shorten the course by finishing a race at a rounding mark...because of insufficient wind..." Here is a committee man's rule if ever there was one. What, pray tell, is the purpose ofa time limit? Any racing skipper will tell you: "To protect skippers from having to finish races in extremely light airs, because such airs are always so fluky that it is better that those races should not count in the series score." Thus this rule, allowing the course to be shortened on such a day, exactly defeats the purpose of a time limit. But the race committee man has an altogether different answer. "I never even thought of that," he says. "The purpose of the time limit is to get people home for dinner! If we had no time limit, you'd have to stay out there all night trying to finish. Now, if after a lot of hard work you get only half way around the course by eventide, why not let us establish the finish at the halfway mark? Then you will have a race under your belts instead of no race, we will have somebody to whom to award the prizes that our Prize committe spent so much time procuring, and the press will have a regatta to report." Let's face it: for the committee man, a race is not something to be sailed; it is something to be disposed of."

This illustrates the deeper problem within the afore-mentioned problem. Most committee members (there are some good ones out there and to you I apologize) believe that a bad race is better than no race. In light air, this is simply not the case. If the wind is too light and fluky to be at all predictable, then it is not a race of skill but degrades to a race of chance, of who happens to be in the right place at the right time and anybody's guess is as good as another's as to where the wind will come from next. This certainly is not a race worth counting.

 

[Rob B]

RC's have a couple of options. The best one is the "postpone ashore" if conditions look really bad at the beginning of the day and I've even seen this done in the middle of the day when the sailing area was close enough to shore/club. However, if you are sitting on a course, far from shore and end up in an extended postpone the onus really is on the sailor to keep your head up. Generally speaking it's easy to tell when conditions may be improving enough that the postpone flag coud come down. My rule of thumb is if it's light don't get far from the line. I usually reach up and down it or around one of the ends in a "holding pattern". The RC is having a hard enough time looking for new breeze, communicating with mark boats and thinking about trying to get a race in. The only option would be to write in your SI's a rule that would extend the period of time from when the postpone flag came down to the warning signal.

 

[Chris123]

Fred raises two really good questions that deserve to be considered semi-independently:

1. What sort of tools does a RC have in its toolkit, that might mitigate the problem of a start on short notice after a long postponement?
2. How do we impress upon race committees the importance of this issue?

I can't say much about #2 other than buying people beer and food always seems to open the mind to new ideas..... Take your local RC out to lunch.

As for #1 -- it's not hard to modify the SIs with something like: "In the event a postponement has extended more than 20 minutes, at the end of the postponement the Race Committee shall lower the Answering Pennant (accompanied by a sound signal), then re-hoist the Answering Pennant (accompanied by a sound signal), and then, no sooner than 5 minutes later, shall again lower the Answering Pennant and proceed with a start sequence"

In other words, if there had been a long postponement, you'd see the flag go down and back up again, and you'd know that you had at least 5 minutes to get yourself ready for the "real" end of the postponement.

 

[jimmy]

It is a postponement not abandonment. If you want to win stay close to the line and pay attention. Some race committees are better than others, but they all are very generous for donating their time. If you do not like the way your local race committee runs the races I suggest you volunteer your time and help the race committee.

Jimmy