2024: InterClub Series Raceday 2
Every season in an afternoon.
The second of this year's InterClub race days was hosted by RWYC so the lake was busy with the Cruiser fleet, a Flying Fifteen fleet, and the Windermere 17 fleet. The forecast suggested a reasonable Westerly for most of the afternoon but the real picture was much more complicated - challenging conditions for the Race Officer.
As can be seen from the results below, Race 1 was unusual, with three boats scored NSC, and three DNF. Not everyone will be familiar with NSC - it was introduced as RRS A10 in the 2021 revision of the Racing Rules together with RRS A5.1 which permits the race committee to score a boat as NSC - "Did not sail the course" without a hearing. This changed the long standing prohibition on such race committee action.
I'll comment further below on what happened, but first, here are the results: -
So, what happened in Race 1? The course was posted as shown: -
As already mentioned, the Cruisers were one fleet of three racing. The Cruisers use signal flag G (Golf) as their Class flag and it can be seen together with the chevron (Naval Numeral 6) flag used by the RWYC as the Flying Fifteen's class flag (pedants will note it is actually displayed rotated by 90 degrees - the chevrons should run up from left to right not down).
So - this indicates the course to sail for both the Flying Fifteens and the Cruiser fleets.
Whilst the Cruisers were in their starting period the Race Officer added another course as shown below: -
This new course begins with the code flag Romeo which is assigned by RWYC as the class flag for the Windermere 17 fleet - so this course only applies to them.
Not everyone is used to seeing starting procedures for multiple fleets however, missed the significance of the class flag indications, and thought that this new course applied to the Cruisers so sailed it - and did not finish as a result.
Two of the three NSC scores (Owasippe & Seventh Heaven) were as a result of rounding Mark 11 to starboard rather than to port as indicated. (Mark 11 is shown on charts as a port mark, however the next mark of the course was mark 4 and this suggested a starboard rounding). Having rounded mark 11 to port, mark 4 is already on starboard and so therefore you can sail straight to mark 13 - which is what Deo confidimus did. (For those interested - we only realised later that the same applied to mark 11 itself, and so in fact both 11P and 4S could be omitted, making the course 4S 12P 5S 13P | 4S 13P x3. However rounding mark 11 to starboard means that it was not left to port at all - hence NSC.)
One final note, Jailbreak and Owassippe rounded mark 13 to starboard rather than to port - both then attempted to unwind to correct their error. Owassippe did this and pointed out that Jailbreak didn't - Jailbreak graciously volunteered to be disqualified but the correct action in this case is to score NSC. (Owasippe were scored NSC because they rounded mark 11 in the wrong direction). Paul produced a picture that explains this nicely: -
And that, fellow sailors, is more or less the story of Race 1.
Race 2 was less eventful. The third and final race day of this year's InterClub competition is Saturday 7th September - we hope to see you then!
