At the recent OCR & NA's, my Tornado was on the recieving end of several obvious fouls (port/starboards, luffing before start, tacking on starboard layline within 2 bl's of top mark), some by top teams in the sport. We also had several teams trying to intimidate us on the start line by yelling that we could not luff them from leeward...this might even be an sportsmanship rule infringement.

Hailing "Protest", popping out the red flag (required by the 20' rule as T's are just a bit longer) made no difference...no boat made a penalty turn. Though against my better judgement, we did not follow these up with the formal protest procedure. Realistically, we were at the back of the fleet, some offenders in the top ten...we'd not gain much more than a moral victory, while they could lose their shot at the games. Plus, it's a very small group of teams and the bad karma is never good. We did have a couple of guys come up to us afterwards to apologize for the fouls...an unexpected olive-branch.