Recent Posts

• Definition of Room and Case 103
  5 Comments
  Steve Shepstone Tue 00:11
• It's too difficult to Import Competitors
  11 Comments
  Michael Butterfield 19-Jan-11 19:44
• Merry Christmas from RacingRulesOfSailing
  3 Comments
  Paul Zupan 18-Dec-25 18:00
• New Q&A 2018-016
  0 Comments
  Paul Zupan 18-Dec-22 03:13
• New Q&A 2018-015
  3 Comments
  Paul Zupan 18-Dec-22 03:12

Recent Comments

• It's too difficult to Import Competitors

  Tried and works - I did not realise you did not need to populate the boxes below.

  Michael Butterfield Today 17:26
• Definition of Room and Case 103

  I don't think my original question provided enough detail.  I've spent a lot of time racing, judging, and umpiring in the Sunfish and Sonar classes.  In both classes, the room required to manuever is very much dictated by the size of the skipper, not by skill level.  It's a question of what is physically possible for a skipper to do.

  In the Sunfish Class, the boat handling issue is getting under the boom when tacking or jybing.  Smaller skippers can dive under the boom with no problem.  The boom gets stuck on the back of the larger skippers, who then have to use an arm to bend the boom upward far enough to break free, hopefully in time to get across the boat before capsizing.

  In Sonars, the size effect is the opposite.  The larger skippers can hook a foot under the traveller, use their size and height, and lever the boat into a quick roll tack or roll jybe.  The smaller skippers can't reach the traveller bar, and cannot get their weight outside the boat.  The extra muscle mass also allows the larger skipper to rig the mainsheet 4:1.  The smaller skippers have to use a 5:1 mainsheet, taking 25% more time to trim the main.

  Picture 11 expert skippers.  The smallest is 100# and 5' tall.  The largest is 200# and 6.5' tall.  The rest are distributed evenly by size between the smallest and the largest.  Now lets say that in the Sunfish the largest skipper requires 50% room to round a mark or respond to another boat acquiring R-O-W.  In the Sonar, it's reversed, and the smallest skipper requires 50% more room than the largest skipper.  If the performance difference is linear by size, you get a table of room required that looks like this:

  Skipper by Weight                    Required Room Factor

                                           Sunfish                    Sonar

  100                                       1.00                      1.50

  110                                       1.05                      1.45

  120                                       1.10                      1.40

  130                                       1.15                      1.35

  140                                       1.20                      1.30

  150                                       1.25                      1.25

  160                                       1.30                      1.20

  170                                       1.35                      1.15

  180                                       1.40                      1.10

  190                                       1.45                      1.05

  200                                       1.50                      1.00

  In this situation, how do you decide how much room is allowed?

  Steve Shepstone Today 03:13
• Unrestricted Access to Protest Form

  Good point Niall.  We want the competitor to be able to provide their email and telephone if it is not already in the competitor list, but we shouldn't make it public if it is.  So perhaps the solution is to obfuscate both.  The first two letters and  domain name for email (e.g.; pz...@yahoo.com) and the last four numbers of the telepone (e.g.; ....5478).  Then the compeititor can correct or change it, if necessary, but it is not a valid address or telephone number otherwise.

  Paul Zupan Yesterday 18:59
• Case 132 has changed.
  Sorry for the delay. The editor component has upgraded and is broken (and there is no backward path). I'm in contact with the author, but will probably take some time. I've been threatening to switch this editor out for something more stable and perhaps now (this weekend) is the time...
  Paul Zupan 19-Jan-09 19:56
• Some Questions about Rule 18
  I think the simple answer to Phillip's question, above, is that, assuming Yellow entered the zone clear ahead, she is entitled to mark-room at position 2 and, assuming yellow has passed the mark at position 3, Blue has mark-room at that time.
  
  This transfer of obligations was unintended by the rule-writers. I know this because I was one of them.
  
  The brief history of the words "or has been given that mark-room" in rule 18..2.(d) is this:
  
  There used to be a criterion for when rule 18 turns off -- rule 18 applied "until the boats have passed the mark". But that turns out not to work; picture two Sunfish, with their long booms, passing close by a windward mark, overlapped and with the windward boat bows-out on the leeward boat. The leeward boat cannot release her sheet and bear off until she is past the mark, and at that point the windward boat is also past the mark; yet we surely don't want to turn off rule 18 yet, as the boats have barely begun to round the mark! The simple requirement "the boats have passed the mark" also doesn't work in other common scenarios, especially where there is a current and boats must sail beyond the point where the mark is clear astern of them, in order to sail the course without risk of hitting the mark. So that statement was removed in 2009. It was not replaced because, as John Allen points out above, such a clause seems unnecessary -- rule 18's provisions about mark-room "turn off" (or, more precisely, become moot) when there is no more room to be given.
  
  Alas, a rule that turns on at a clear point (when one of the boats enters the zone) and then doesn't turn itself off again bothers the heck out of people, especially because rule 18.2(b) says that a boat clear ahead or overlapped at the zone is entitled to mark-room "thereafter", which is a pretty strong word; it's used in religion to indicate eternity. Anybody who presented a class or seminar on the rules between 2009 and 2013 knows that sooner or later somebody would ask, "But when does the rule turn off?" The explanation, that it really doesn't turn off until both boats leave the zone, but that doesn't matter because at some point there is no more room to be given, takes a long time and satisfies nobody.
  
  So we decided to answer the question if we could find an easy fix. Rule 18.2(d) already had two conditions where a boat can lose her right to mark-room, so that seemed an obvious place to add an additional condition. Further, it's rule 18.2(b) that uses the word "thereafter", and as everybody knows, it's rule 18.2(b) that almost always grants mark-room, so a rule that talks about entitlement for mark-room under rule 18.2(b) seemed like a good place to put a criterion for that rule turning off.
  
  Rules-makers soon recognized that this was a mistake. We never intended to switch the right to mark-room, from the boat clear ahead or overlapped inside at the zone, to the other boat. However, as a practical matter it's not a big deal -- once a boat has been given mark-room, she is sailing the next leg (or finished) and the requirement for her to give mark-room to a boat overlapped inside her is not onerous. Furthermore, almost anything she might do that deprives the other boat of the space to round the mark is prohibited by rules 15 or 16 (remember, it is unseamanlike to hit a mark, so if she changes course in such a way that the boat inside her is compelled to hit the mark, she breaks rule 16, even if she doesn't owe that boat mark-room).
  
  Still, the problem should be fixed, and in their annual conference in October, 2018, World Sailing passed changes to rule 18 and the definition "mark-room", to answer the question better in 2021. These changes remove the words "when mark-room has been given" from rule 18.2(d), and move them to a new sentence in rule 18.1 turning off all of rule 18 when mark-room has been given (regardless of whether it was given under rule 18.2(b) or some other part of the rule) and the mark no longer influences the course of the boat entitled to that room. WS also passed changes to the definition mark-room making it clear that mark-room has been given only when the boat entitled to mark-room is past the mark and she can continue to sail the course without hitting that mark. This is not an urgent change and will not come into effect until January, 2021. Note also that the change made in 2018 can be reviewed by National Authorities and edits proposed in 2019; in fact, the US Racing Rules Committee is currently working on some minor word-smithing for the new definition.
  Rob Overton 19-Jan-02 17:19