Segmented Starting Lines Rule

Ken: Last August I was the principal race officer for the Shark World Championship regatta. I was led to the concept of a segmented starting line by a member of our international jury and the idea was subsequently reinforced by a good friend, Paul Hays, who assisted us on the race course. We had 63 boats on a starting line consisting of a pin end boat, mid-line boat and starboard end boat plus a signal boat 100 yards to windward of the mid-line boat so that all could see and hear our signals. We conducted 11 races and had only 1 general recall. In most races we called boats OCS. We never even considered using a black flag – the segmented line gave us all the traffic control we needed. Ken, thank you for such a brilliant solution. Without it we’d have been black flagging the fleet left right and centre – instead we ran a clean regatta. Please feel free to add the 2009 Shark Worlds as a testimonial to the wisdom of using the segmented starting line.