Today I chased 29ers. The wind increased during the darker clouds to 20-22 knots and some of the boys and girls had a hard time keeping their skiff upright. But those who did, went very fast indeed. And we followed them to the windward mark and back to the gate downwind.
With eight races it was a long day, but very nice nevertheless, if only by the speed these boats can reach. In the International Part we are allowed to whistle and show a red flag when we see a boat break a rule. It is then up to the competitors to decide if they want to take a penalty. And all of them did. It does not restrict their right to protest – only that we are there watching and hopefully keep the rules infringements to an acceptable level.
An excellent job for a Match Race umpire who has to watch a fleetrace, imho.
For the rules I have no new items today, save it to point you to Matt’s post on his blog Unruly about Video Evidence. Have a look at the Optimist overhauling the AC45s.
I am quite happy to look at video evidence - subject to the advice provided in Appendix M7.
ReplyDeleteMore interesting is the question of GPS tracking devices.
97% of the time, the error in position reported by an ordinary GPS is in the range of +/- 3 metres. Since errors are cumulative, when considering the positions of two boats, the range of error is +/- 6 metres.
The real horror is that in the remaining 3 % of the time the error range is +/- 15 metres so using these in a protest hearing is difficult and there is no way to evaluate the errors.
I was chief judge at one event about five years ago and we wrote a sailing instruction amendment to prohibit GPS evidence. That was a good thing since, when we were watching a replay (although not a incident that resulted in a protest), one skipper said: "that's rubbish, I was the inside boat at that leeward mark" and the other skipper agreed!
I am sure that AC34 has enough money to invest in aircraft/military standard GPS where, I am told, error rates are as low as +/- 20 cm but until the prices come way down, it would be nice if ISAF would provide some guidance in a form similar to Appendix M7 for video evidence.