Day 30 – Beating against the wind, the tide, and the race committee

As I am slowly making my way up the South coast against the by now usual headwinds (I covered the 5 miles distance from the pin on the chart – when the tide turned against us – to Dungeness in a little more than 5 hours), I get notified that I will be penalised if not outright disqualified and fined for entering the TSS, yesterday night (yes, I did make a little incursion to France, while I was dealing with other issues…). When I mentioned that I interpreted their email reported below by meaning that TSS could in fact be crossed, I got an incredible reply  from the Worst Race Committee Ever (WRCE). Let me show you both.

First, their “official” email:

Dear skippers,

Leg 1 saw 3 boats who took care to avoid the TSS in line with the good intentions laid out during the race briefing. Those boats were ‘Polished Manx’, ‘Morpheus’ and ‘Olbia’.

The ambiguity behind the wording of the relevant rules within COLREGS and the way the process was interpreted has led to 3 boats being penalised for following the directions in the spirit to which it was intended.

Therefore, the race committee will credit all 3 boats with a 5% time correction after the finish. This will be based on leg 1 elapsed times.

Then, the clarification:

What actually happened was that all but 3 were given a penalty but i was advised by the ij that the colregs are ambiguous. Those who had gone by my request then felt that they were justified to redress. We gave 5% redress and that was that.

Now, it occurs to me that there is a big difference between saying that “all but 3 boats were given a penalty” and saying that 3 yachts were given a compensation. You don’t reward people for doing what they are supposed to do! It was all too natural, I believe, to assume that the 3 boats where given a bonus for having done something positive which they might have not done, after all.

I don’t really care about the ranking – what’s the value of looking at corrected time on such a long race, with such different boats. Even assuming that handicaps are right (which is laughable, consider that they put Pegasus only twice as fast as Mea), the winner will be whoever is more lucky with the weather.

But if they want to disqualify us, they should do it for the right reason (and there are plenty, including partly sailing a two-handed race single-handed…).