ex-Gladys
Well-known member
Actually the Col Regs trump the racing rules, the RRS used to state this, haven't looked at them for a few years
Those posts remind me that years ago I sailed a Firefly dinghy on a narrow stretch of river frequented by motor boats. Being a small family club with very restricted waters nobody (with a few dishonourable exceptions) took the racing very seriously, so we just worked around the motorboats, treating them as 'obstructions', and never expected them to give way.
Most of the time that worked, but there were always those motorboats who had no conception of how a sailing boat moved, no matter how many they had previously seen; were easily panicked; and it also never occurred to them that they could avoid collisions by altering speed, rather than course.
So you'd be tacking up the river heading towards one bank, having calculated you'd have tacked and be out of their way off to the other side of the river before the approaching motorboat arrived at that point. The motorboat would see you heading to 'their' side of the river, panic, and swerve across the river towards where you were planning to be after your tack. A merry dance would then ensue while you short tacked back into 'their' side bank, they'd then swerve back in towards that bank seemingly urgently wanting to recover the line they were on (no matter how inconsistent with the rules it was), putting their boat just where you needed to be after the additional tack at the bank you were now making.
More than once I had to just ram the boat into the bank, or turn onto a run, to avoid the collision every move of a motorboat seemed determined to achieve!
. . . those sure were the days of early Boating on them Broads .
My guess is though that you have survived it all , and are now a better Skipper for those experiences !