PART 5
Q&A G 002 points out that a race that is abandoned by the race committee can be reinstated. However, a race committee’s decision to abandon is to be overturned when that decision was clearly improper: the fact that other options not including abandonment were available is not enough on its own for a protest committee to annul the abandonment.
If there is to be reinstatement of a race that the race committee abandoned after the race is completed, then the provisional results can be reinstated. If it was abandoned during the race, there may be previous rounding positions or times that could be used to generate a result, if that appears equitable. I would add that, when the abandoned race is part of a regatta, the hearing may not be possible before further races are sailed. If the race in question is race 5, the race committee may already have scored the next race as a resail of race 5. If the abandoned race is then scored as a result of the redress decision, the next race that was sailed will become race 6. However, there can be complications over BFDs if the race in question was restarted after a black flag start and general recall.
Letting the results stand as the least worst option may result in rule breaches being accepted as unavoidable. In RYA 1993/1, the sailing instructions were badly drafted, so as to make it impossible to sail the course.
All boats broke rule 28.1. This resulted from the act of the race committee in setting a course that could neither be started nor finished, and in which the only way rule 28 could be complied with…was neither as it must have been intended, nor as any boat might have reasonably expected. All boats, including the appellant, appear to have made a reasonable attempt to extract a sailable course from the instructions given.
No boat was at fault, and so all boats are entitled to redress from their technical liability to disqualification. The appellant does not allege that the slightly greater distance she sailed compared with the protested boats affected her finishing position.
The case is returned to the protest committee to grant redress. The protest committee may consider that the most equitable redress is for the appellant to be reinstated in her actual finishing position, and for the resulting positions to constitute the result of the race1
.
However, letting the results stand should not be used when there is a fairer option. In RYA 2013/1, a race committee signalling error resulted in confusion and considerable changes of race positions. A Topper asked for redress for herself and two others. The protest committee was satisfied that all three had been adversely affected, and indeed was able to establish the places lost by them. Nevertheless, its redress was to let the results stand, since many other boats had been affected by the mistake, but it was not possible to identify them or the places they had lost. The Topper’s appeal was upheld. ‘The protest committee was correct in awarding redress but as the loss of places by the three boats were facts found it should have awarded improved places to the boats identified as affected… Leaving all scores unchanged is not as fair an arrangement as possible for all boats affected. The possibility that other boats might have been affected is not a good reason to refuse recompense to those boats known to have been disadvantaged by the error of the race committee.’
The history of WS 45 makes an important point. In that case, a sailing instruction specified a hook finish, contrary to the definition Finish. Some boats complied with this invalid instruction, hooked round a finishing mark before crossing the line and were given a finishing position: others ignored the sailing instruction, crossed the finishing line in the direction of the course from the last mark and were scored DNF. In the resulting requests for redress, the protest committee decided that the most equitable arrangement was to grant redress by letting the results stand in the order that boats had crossed the finishing line, regardless of the direction of finish, and one boat that had complied with the definition appealed. The case upholds the protest committee.
Because the sailing instruction that conflicted with the definition Finish was invalid, issuing it was an improper action of the race committee that qualified…boats for redress…None of the boats gained or lost as a result of the race committee error, so the redress awarded was appropriate.
1 This case was an appeal against disqualification. It would have been an appropriate decision to have been taken at the original hearing. RYA The Racing Rules Explained 215
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