The Racing Rules of Sailing
General Recall and Identified Boats
This weekend in a regatta, RC called a General Recall four a start in our 6 boat class. The RC then hailed “General Recall, the only boat not OCS was [our boat name].” It seems that the RC identified all boats who were OCS. My question is what would redress look like if we protested RC? We did not, but could we have?
Created: Today 17:03
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As I note below, it's possible the RC is not able to manage that recall, but giving it a try is the most fair thing to do.
However, in interest of fairness, the proper action is for the RC to allow the race to proceed by individually calling all others OCS. It is as patently unfair to deny a proper start to one boat as it would be to ignore one OCS. No matter how many boats are in the class, a fair start is the sole obligation the RC has to the competitors, if the minority or majority of boats get it wrong they are not owed another chance.
In a six boat class, a really good race committee should be able to identify the five OCS boats and recall them AND clear them.
Trouble determining who has cleared is what an RC that's unable to accurately make the recall could stand on. I once did the "all boats except" x-flag but was completely unable to determine which boats had cleared, especially since we didn't have a round-the-ends rule in effect. Making this call would require excellent work from the RC team and a lot of confidence, as well as some willingness to try, and then to abandon if needed. Since this was not done, it might be worth a heart-to-heart with the PRO that day. What would it take for that PRO to be able to make the call of five boats over? Do they know they can wait to hail numbers for many seconds while gathering data? Do they have a recorder onboard who is writing down everything they say? Are they running an audio recorder at the starts? Most club RC's are just not equipped to call more than say 3-4 boats OCS.