As Christian says, we don't expect boats to be sailed expertly.  We all make mistakes.  We all have bad luck from time to time.  That's a reasonable expectation of sailing.  There is no rule against making mistakes or having bad luck.  It would not be reasonable to make such rules.  (Don't quote 14 here - that's a circular reference.)

As Philip implies, releasing mainsheet in close quarters is problematic.  So ROW was restrained from having bad luck or making a mistake (or even freely trimming) by W's close proximity.

You both forget to juxtapose the rule 11.  The 'close-quarters' restrained L.  That restraint effectively meant that L had to constantly take avoiding action (don't make mistakes and have only good luck).  This breaks rule 11.

So your question should now be...

"Does that reasonable bad luck / mistake turn unreasonable when the rule 11 buffer of protection was illegally infiltrated by another boat?"

I'm not sure it does.

We have had this come up a few times at our club and have defined the winner of the trophy/prize/money as the person who entered the boat and paid the entry fee.

It is a good idea to set this out in NOR so that it is clear, especially when there is a large sum of money riding on the prize.

Set TWD (mag)
Leg#  Mrk1 Mrk2 Bearing TWA(p/s)  Dist

That could easily fit width wise on a phone. 

When setting the marks, if they are govt marks hyperlinking to details regards bells/flash height etc .. avail as a pop-up will keep the list clean. 

Richard, thank you for your open minded response, but i agree with Sue that relaxing the promptness of the hail and RRS 44 penalty requirements would be undesirable.

One of the purposes of the suggestion was to reinforce the requirements for prompt hail and prompt response.

If you let go of those requirements you will get into all sorts of disputes about:

AIUI the purpose of making the respondent (not a word in this RRS) field mandatory is that the system automatically messages that entity that they are the subject of a hearing.  Naming a boat there will make it appear that that boat has been protested.

Wouldn't a better solution for requests fo  redress be to either omit the respondent field or make it non mandatory, and message the race committee that a request has been received in every case?