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.
I apologise for digging this thread up out of the back pages of the forum, but reading the above statement made me want to comment :
While I appreciate that you don`t want to be the most unpopular guy in the pub after racing, and while protesting a top-runner in the fleet while you are mid-fleet or back of fleet seems inappropriate, please bear in mind that YOU are responsible for the attitude of the rule-breakers in the fleet, who are usually also the top of the fleet sailors, quite often (not always). By hailing your intent to protest and then not carrying it out you are allowing them to call your bluff - next time they will roll over you, break a rule and just carry on sailing. And they will do it to others UNTIL they are DSQ`ed from a race or two.
I recall two separate incidents : Hobie African Champs in which the World Champ started on Port and forced over 30 competitors to crash-tack to avoid hitting him, he did no penalty after the chaos he created, and was first to the weather mark. In my opinion, he should have done 30x 360 turns or been DSQ`ed, but of course no-one protested.
In another incident I was in a line of starboard boats all on lay-line for the weather mark, a port boat came zig-zagging through forcing the boat below me to bear away violently to avoid hitting him, and he then had to bear away to avoid hitting me. Of course in the bear-away he powered up and banged my port rudder, luckily with only minor damage. To his complete amazement I protested him, he did no penalty so I carried out the protest and he was DSQed.
He approached me afterwards, shocked that I had protested, since we were not even sailing the same class of boat, so my protest was not to gain a position in the fleet or anything.
My response was that you can`t go bashing your way around the fleet and do no penalty, even if it is part of "the H---- way of life".
I think that there exists this culture that folks will only protest if they have something to gain, which is wrong. If someone infringes a rule and comes last in the race, he should still face a protest hearing so that he can learn from his mistakes, or he may never know he is making them. My friend above sincerely didn`t know or refused to believe that other boats on the course not in his class also had right of way.
So if you break a rule and I`m near, please do a turn, it will avoid the waste of valuable drinking time after the race.
