Protest by Technical Committee at Cork Week

[mrming]

“Swuzzlebubble’s headsails (2 of) were measured as part of equipment inspection. Several dimensions were found to be larger than the dimensions stated on her IRC certificate”

That’s a direct quote from the event document. I’ve raced against this boat many times. I know of another previous, relatively recent Cork Week winner which subsequently turned out to have creativity applied to her rating.

How much of this is going on in IRC, and what can we do about it?

 

[Chiara’s slave]

“Swuzzlebubble’s headsails (2 of) were measured as part of equipment inspection. Several dimensions were found to be larger than the dimensions stated on her IRC certificate”

That’s a direct quote from the event document. I’ve raced against this boat many times. I know of another previous, relatively recent Cork Week winner which subsequently turned out to have creativity applied to her rating.

How much of this is going on in IRC, and what can we do about it?

Not just IRC. People will cheat if they think they can get away with it.
Find me the black band on this guy’s mast.

 

[Neeves]

Not just IRC. People will cheat if they think they can get away with it.
Find me the black band on this guy’s mast.
View attachment 180241

Then you should protest the omission. You know of the infringement and you should now be protested for not protesting.

Jonathan

 

[B27]

What we can do about it is send scrutineers on to winning boats.
Simple as that.
It's what you'd expect at a major dinghy event.
And probably in most 'equipment sports'?

 

[ridgy]

Does the boat have an endorsed irc ticket? If so then suggestions of collusion with a measurer would be bad. If not then I bet plenty of self measured boats "err on the side of beneficial caution". How far out are we talking?

 

[MikeBz]

Then you should protest the omission. You know of the infringement and you should now be protested for not protesting.

Jonathan

A 3rd party which witnesses an incident where a boat or boats break a rule of part 2 (when boats meet) or rule 31 (touching a mark) can initiate a protest, but that doesn’t allow a 4th party to protest a 3rd party for not protesting a technical infringement that they noticed.

 

[Chiara’s slave]

Then you should protest the omission. You know of the infringement and you should now be protested for not protesting.

Jonathan

It’s not a protest matter. It’s a class rule infringement. It’s thought he also has a sliding gooseneck under that cover. Funny thing is, he's a fantastic sailor and has just won a regatta in a borrowed boat that is, as far as can be said, legal.

 

[stranded]

“People will cheat if they think they can get away with it”

Can anyone explain what the cheat gains by cheating - excepting lucrative sports, obviously. Do they lie in bed at night smug in their knowledge they got one over on everyone else? Why would anyone want to play with them?

 

[B27]

If you're going to accuse anyone of cheating, there is a proper channel for that, a protest.
To accuse someone of cheating anonymously on a forum where they may not be in a position to reply is generally out of order.

In some classes it's easy for a boat to be 'technically' out of class, without any significant performance gain.
Old boats, low-budget boats, 'club level' racing.

Top tip: understand the ethos of the class before buying a boat.
There are some older classes where I think it's fair to say the 'rules like what they are wrote down' and the 'rules understood by the players' have diverged.
There are also classes where boats have valid measurement certificates which pre-date rule changes.
And plenty of class rules which are open to interpretation.

 

[Puffin10032]

If you're going to accuse anyone of cheating, there is a proper channel for that, a protest.
To accuse someone of cheating anonymously on a forum where they may not be in a position to reply is generally out of order.

In some classes it's easy for a boat to be 'technically' out of class, without any significant performance gain.
Old boats, low-budget boats, 'club level' racing.

Top tip: understand the ethos of the class before buying a boat.
There are some older classes where I think it's fair to say the 'rules like what they are wrote down' and the 'rules understood by the players' have diverged.
There are also classes where boats have valid measurement certificates which pre-date rule changes.
And plenty of class rules which are open to interpretation.

Lots of dinghy classes have now rewritten their rules to conform to ERS methodologies and this can sometimes lead to differences which could theoretically put earlier boats out of class (this is most noticeable with sails and especially the position of batten pockets). The simple fix which seems to be adopted is insert a clause into the class rules which says that the measurement certificate is valid if the measurements conform with the class rules in force at the time of measurement. If you don't have a mechanism like that then as soon as the new class rules are adopted all existing boats become out of class, which is hardly helpful.

 

[B27]

Lots of dinghy classes have now rewritten their rules to conform to ERS methodologies and this can sometimes lead to differences which could theoretically put earlier boats out of class (this is most noticeable with sails and especially the position of batten pockets). The simple fix which seems to be adopted is insert a clause into the class rules which says that the measurement certificate is valid if the measurements conform with the class rules in force at the time of measurement. If you don't have a mechanism like that then as soon as the new class rules are adopted all existing boats become out of class, which is hardly helpful.

Mostly, people get by with a level of enforcement appropriate to the context.
People racing at club level, there may be pro's and con's of having an old boat or a previous generation of sail.
If you're in contention for the podium of a Worlds in an international class, then you should expect your opponent to be on the lookout for you bending the rules, let alone breaking them.

There are complexities when old boats with valid certificates get refurbished, at what point should the be re-measured to current rules?
If I change one fitting because it breaks, should I have to bring the whole boat to the latest rules?
If you want to race in a vintage fleet, you need to understand their way of doing things, if you don't like it, then there are plenty of other fleets.
Likewise if you seek to join a fleet and push their rules, then I've seen that end badly.

People should know where they stand when they enter an event.
A top-flight event like Cork Week, you should expect the rules to be applied fairly and quite strictly.
Thursday evening up the creek, maybe more grey areas.

If someone has made a genuine error, then winning on the water but having their paper results in the bin won't kill them.

It's easy for forums to 'go off on one' with his kind of thing, the reality among the competitors may well that they are all good friends and it's all part of the game. Media pundits stir things up. People not involved express strong opinions....

 

[Chiara’s slave]

What we can do about it is send scrutineers on to winning boats.
Simple as that.
It's what you'd expect at a major dinghy event.
And probably in most 'equipment sports'?

That would be very satisfactory. But it often isn’t so simple. At the moment, whilst I take on board your admonishment, I’m not going to make it worse by explaining, which would remove the offending boat’s anonymity too.

 

[dunedin]

It’s not a protest matter. It’s a class rule infringement. It’s thought he also has a sliding gooseneck under that cover. Funny thing is, he's a fantastic sailor and has just won a regatta in a borrowed boat that is, as far as can be said, legal.

Surely you can protest a boat not coming with class rules (assuming it us a class event). Certainly was the case previoulsly.
If a novice skipper a quiet word first might be in order, so they can correct it.

 

[B27]

... the offending boat’s anonymity too.

There's only so many white boats of a well known class in a popular Solent river....


'Anonymity Too' sounds like a good name for a BenJenBav 35 by the way!

 

[Chiara’s slave]

There's only so many white boats of a well known class in a popular Solent river....


'Anonymity Too' sounds like a good name for a BenJenBav 35 by the way!

You’re not familiar with the class then. Half of them are white.

 

[mrming]

Hats off to Cork Week for actually measuring the boat btw - hopefully that in itself will help, and it would be good to see some other events do more measuring of winning boats. The difficulty with IRC is you can’t really tell by eye if someone’s headsail is 10% bigger than rated. If competitors know there’s a good chance of being measured, however, they might think twice about taking the risk.

 

[flaming]

I'm reluctant to condemn the boat / crew without knowing the full details. There are plenty of ways that what happened could be a mistake rather than cheating.
For example, it could be that the sails used for the event were not the latest, but the previous set, and a decision had been made to downsize, which was then forgotten when the decision to use the older set was made.
Another possibility could be that the J1 was assumed by the crew to be the largest sail, so was measured and those numbers used for the rating, but in fact the J2 was actually larger. We had this recently when we had a new J2, and the sailmaker pointed out that it was actually very slightly bigger than the latest measurements of the J1, so we had to use the J2 measurements on the cert. A less alert sailmaker might not have noticed, especially if they were not the same loft who'd made / measured the J1.

It's also the case that the boat changed hands in the not too distant past, so it's also possible that the numbers on the cert date to the previous owner. Yes you should check, but really, who measures all the headsails when they take over a boat?
In reality, we all rely on the sailmakers to measure the sails and then submit the data to the rating office. It seems remarkably unlikely that the numbers submitted were not valid for the sail that was measured. Far more likely that the certificate was not based on the sail that was found to be larger.

 

[flaming]

Oh...
I just found the protest form.
Racing Rules of Sailing

The pictures of the measurements of the jibs as declared by the sailmaker, when taken with the online data for the boat's declared measurements, are interesting. That rating is definitely not based on those jibs. Indeed the sail data is declared as provided in July 2017. When the date on the jibs are 2022 and 2023.

I'm still far more inclined to think "mistake" rather than cheating though. A false assumption that the new sails are the same size as the old, or the new sail data not being applied to the new rating at revalidation and the owner missing that. No excuse, but I suspect unlikely to be intentional cheating.

 

[mrming]

Can’t possibly tell if intentional or not of course, however rather than brushing this under the carpet it would be a good opportunity for some of our more high profile events to remind competitors that measuring is a thing, and that they should check that the numbers on their cert match the equipment they’re sailing with. It’s a lot of time and effort to optimise a boat within the rules, so I personally would appreciate it if people took the time to check. These are teams at the top of IRC with generous budgets, after all.

 

[flaming]

Can’t possibly tell if intentional or not of course, however rather than brushing this under the carpet it would be a good opportunity for some of our more high profile events to remind competitors that measuring is a thing, and that they should check that the numbers on their cert match the equipment they’re sailing with. It’s a lot of time and effort to optimise a boat within the rules, so I personally would appreciate it if people took the time to check. These are teams at the top of IRC with generous budgets, after all.

Nothing I would disagree with there. We had some basic scrutineering at the IRC nats this year. We weren't paid all that much attention personally, mostly I suspect because the scrutineer employed was the chap who'd weighed my boat not 3 months beforehand....

Now that RORC have made the numbers that go into each boat's cert public, I think there is a lot of potential to spot anomalies like this. For example, that a boat at the front of the fleet supposedly was sailing with 7 year old sails.