As I said, these problems can be resolved by courses that are properly set up to accommodate boats of greatly different speeds.
Mary,
Have you got some examples of how courses can be set to compensate for this?
One thing we have done is to set a shorter course for the slower boats by adding a different colored A mark downwind of the long course A mark.
This doesn't address boats with big speed differences meeting at C mark. That could be resolved with another C mark for the short course (but we ony have 3 marks at the moment).
We have a fun regatta coming next weekend where we will have everything from Waves to I20s on the water - so all ideas are welcome. For quite a few people this will be their first race - I don't want it to be the last.
Chris.