"DSK" wrote in message

....I read at the time that the top sailor in the Snipe Junior Nationals
was DSQ'd from two races in 1972 for roll tacking. He still won the
nationals that year, his other finishes were 1-1-1-1-2-1-1.

Sounds like a pretty good series for him.

The kid was awesome. He weighed in, dripping wet, at about 105 lbs. and
used his little brother (about 80 lbs.) as his crew. Not to mention that
his folks owned a sailmaking company which, at the time, were producing some
of the finest Snipe sails available. We also noticed that his sails didn't
look like the ones everyone else got from his parents' company.

But the scuttlebut thereafter was that roll tacking wasn't allowed in
Snipes. A few years later everyone was doing it. Things change.


Things definitely change.



If one were to roll-tack one's way up the windward leg, using each tack
simply for propulsion and not because of windshifts or competitors, that
would be illegal, then & now.


Interpretation changes with time.

And with location, and with present company.


... Kinetics become better-defined and written rules become more
specific. When I raced Snipes they were the second largest one-design
class in the world, with Sunfish #1. Now neither class is even viable
any longer.


What? The Snipe class may be staging a comeback you haven't noticed. I see
a fair amount of them around the Southeast. OTOH Fireballs and Y-Flyers
seem to have gone the way of the dodo.

Snipes have made a comeback of sorts, but they are a far cry from what they
were in the Seventies. There were nearly 20,000 registered Snipes by '75.



If you get DSQ'd you should honestly be able to say (and hopefully get
the backing of a few other skippers) "I was doing exactly what the other
boats were doing, so DSQ them also."

Maxprop wrote:
Depends upon how well politically aligned you are with the race
committee. My experience is that most race committees tend to have
selective vision and variable rules interpretation skills.

No, that should NEVER be a factor. A Race Committee, or a Protest
Committee, can NOT simply DSQ a competitor without a hearing on the same
rules of order as a protest by a competitor.

That's precisely what happened. Someone protests a competitor for using
kinetics--the word was "ooching" in the instance in question--and the race
committee convenes a post-race hearing to determine who was right. The
politically-aligned sailors always won, in my experience. No one really
knew the term "roll-tack" at the time, so such a maneuver was covered by the
next closest term--ooching. It's wasn't ooching at all, nor even close, but
that didn't matter to the race committee, who may as well have been demigods
with the power they possessed over such situations.

Protest committees occasionally hand out weird decisions... I can recall
being DSQ'd for being hit by a windward boat who felt that I was in his
way... it wasn't worth an appeal.

Why? Were you that far behind? g

Most Protest Committees these days err on the side of political
correctness, and shy away from doing anything as offensive as DSQ'ing
anybody.

As we've both said above, times change. Back then blatant political
decisions, or cronyism, was the norm. I gave up Laser racing because of
such crap.

Quick story: I was shoved against a mark during a rounding by a boat over
whom I clearly had rights. He knew it too, and smiled at me when I
protested him. I did my 720, lost six positions, regained three while he
won the race. Before the hearing, one of the old yacht club regulars asked
me, "Heh, heh, do you really think you can get a decision over Lew, heh,
heh?" I said, "Hell yes, he was clearly in violation of rule # such and
such . . . ." I lost.

Max