Hi Airborne,

Don't get too stressed over it. This is a theoretical discussion more than anything. Actually on the race track, sailing is not much different to driving your car around the town. There rules look daunting however in practice it's nearly always pretty straight forward in practice.

As somebody else mentioned, usually the fastest action is to avoid the situation all together - a smart tactical call to avoid traffic often gains you heeps. I know from personal experience, I'll often tack away from the fleet for 50m or so to get clean air and not get wrapped up in defending my position (getting sidetracked from the bigger picture). This works more often than not.

Unfortunately at marks, this is not always possible and that is where rules knowledge really helps. I have found "The Rules Book 2005 - 2008" (Eric Twiname, revised by Bryan Willis) to be invaluable. The front half has all sorts of common situations you might find yourself in with explainations of the rules and the back half has the ISAF rules in their raw form which can be a little difficult to digest, especially if you are new to sailing.

Cheers,
Tiger Mike