Well, Dave, you've exposed my secret the reason I don't sail with my class very often. Unfortunately, I'm not alone on this one.

When I attended my boat's "Nationals" for the first time it was an eye opener. I assumed the skippers on the line would have known the basic starting and racing rules but my maneuvering before the start consisted, too much of the time, of staying out of the way of too many skippers who apparently had no idea who had the right of way and were simply milling around waiting for a flag to drop. They weren't simply bluffing . They just didn't have a clue. Barging, port-starboard, touching; it all seemed to happen with rampant abandon before the start. With literally knife-edge sharp aluminum T-foils that can slice polyethylene hulls like butter (the Rave), it makes you think twice about getting too close to those bozos out for a Sunday drive. I felt like I was in a parking lot with the drunk homeless driving grocery carts. I'm a terrible racer but I know the rules; both the old ones and the new, revised ones.

Worse, around the course, I saw three boats touch the buoys during rounding and not one skipper bothered to voluntarily do a penalty turn. One "Nationals" of this class was enough for me.

So, (1)one cannot assume the rules will have been given a glance by all starters and (2) you probably cannot assume damage incurred will be followed through in a gentlemanly manner. I don't know what the answer is there unless the R.C. forces some kind of responsibility. I don't know how they could do anything binding. That's two reasons distance racing seems appealing to me: there's more room to stay out of the way of the ignorant or the indecisive and you can actually GO SOMEHWERE outside the circle along the race with less chance of tangling with the asleep-at-the-wheel.