PART 5
In WS 22, after a collision near a mark, S protested P, citing rule 18 on her protest form as required by rule 62.1(d). The protest committee declared the protest invalid and refused to proceed with the hearing, because it said the protest should have cited rule 10 rather than rule 18. Had the hearing gone ahead and the parties been questioned, the protest committee said, the protest might have been upheld. S appealed.
Rule 62.1(d) requires the protest to identify any rule the protestor believes was broken. If this requirement is not met in the written protest delivered to the race office, it may be met before or during the
hearing.There is no requirement that the rule or rules identified must be the rule or rules that are later determined to have been broken, and it is irrelevant for deciding the validity of the protest that the protestor cited a rule that will very likely not be the applicable rule.
It is the protest committee, after finding the facts, that determines the applicable rule. Rule 64.1(a) states that a disqualification or other penalty shall be imposed whether or not the applicable rule was mentioned in the protest. The appeal is upheld to the extent that the protest committee is instructed to hold a new hearing.
I think that it is quite proper for a member of the protest committee to help a protestor identify the possibly applicable rule while completing a protest form, as long as no comment is made or change is suggested regarding the description of the incident. Indeed, one might ask what purpose rule 62.1(d) serves. It has been known, when a protest committee chairman is in a hurry to get a hearing under way while the protestor is still filling in the protest form and thumbing through the rule book in search of the applicable rule, for the chairman to suggest that the research is stopped and ‘rule 99’ is inserted. It can always be corrected later.
61.3
Protest Time Limit A protest by a boat, or by the race committee, technical committee or protest committee about an incident the committee observed in the racing area, shall be delivered to the race office within the protest time limit stated in the sailing instructions. If none is stated, the time limit is two hours after the last boat in the race finishes. Other race committee, technical committee or protest committee protests shall be delivered to the race office no later than two hours after the committee receives the relevant information. The protest committee shall extend the time if there is good reason to do so.
US 41 gives an example of what should have been a good reason to extend the protest time limit. A boat returned to dock an hour after finishing, her skipper wrote out a protest, and then took two hours of searching before finding a member of the race committee to receive the protest1
.
Occasionally, facts that might justify a protest may not emerge until after the event. In RYA 2005/7, a protestor did not realise that other boats had used sails of a non-permitted material in August’s National Championship until he received notice of a related proposal in the following March to change the class rules to allow the material for the first time, and he lodged a protest in May after the Annual General Meeting. The protest committee decided to extend the time limit, but referred its decision so to do to the RYA. In correcting the decision to extend the time limit, the RYA made the following observations.
It is sometimes unavoidable that the results at the end of an event turn out not to be final. All requests for redress as a result of the publication of the final results must be heard and any subsequent requests for reopening considered. A competitor who has left the site but later finds out his results are not correct is still entitled to have his request for redress heard provided he fulfils the conditions of rule 62.2. Where there is no International Jury, a protest committee’s decision may be changed on appeal.
For protests concerning something that may have happened during racing, however, the RYA considers that a good reason for extending the protest time limit beyond the end of the event will usually be outweighed by the better reason of the need for the results to be as final as possible.
1 Similarly, in an unpublished appeal to the RYA, for an event sailed off a Welsh holiday beach, it was proper to extend the time limit for a party who diligently cycled from lodgings to lodgings in search of the race officer.
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