Now Craig if you had just aked your friendly RO. :) Go home - assuming  the boat has completed the number of laps scheduled.. The last line was added for the case where a course has several laps all passing through a start/finish line at the end of a lap. Without that last phrase, when a boat crossed the line at the end of a lap it would have finished.  

Craig, I think you answered your own question by saying they "continued to sail the course".  If the boat was in fact "continuing to sail the course" as per the definition, and the RC marked them as finished and then packed up and left, then the RC would have made an error (unless there was a "finished on course" provision of some sort). 

Robin,

That what I thought but the definition gives no wriggle room and couldn’t think of a comprehensive answer.

RO has scored the boat A as finished, so for the RO there is nothing else to do.... if boat A wants to go casually sailing in/around the race course, they are free to do it... if by doing so they complete another lap that is just a coincidence.

Unless....   unless boat A commits a penalty while doing this!  In that case boat A has not finished yet!  The RO may know about this maybe because another boat B, that finished later, filed a protest against boat A. Standard protest procedure should apply, and given that the incident occured after boat A finished, the original scored position is now invalid.  If boat A is not disqualified, then RO should try to determine bott A's finishing position as fair as possible.

(We had this situation in aradio-controlled race....)

The Definition of Finish is one that keeps on giving.  ;-)

At the 2022 World Sailing meeting there was a change to RRS 28.2  and a new case approved.   You will find the answer to your question here:  https://d7qh6ksdplczd.cloudfront.net/sailing/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/16103619/012-22-RRS-Rule-28.2-and-New-Case.pdf

Peter

Peter has covered some of the more interesting cases.  There is a simple case that I have run into.  It is what Robin is referring to above.  If you have a multiple lap race and you pass through the finishing line every lap.  If one boat is well behind and the race committee loses track of who is on which lap they may score a boat as finishing after two laps when everyone else had done three.  That boat continues to sail the course to do a third lap to according to the definition of finish they didn't finish.  The race committee packs up and leaves.  The boat (not finding a signal boat when they try to finish after the third lap) goes ashore and discovers that they have already been scored as finishing.  Someone could redress redress due the error of the race committee scoring that boat as finishing after two laps.  The Protest Committee would then find a second error which is the signal boat leaving.  They could award the boat in question last place since that is where they would have finished.

How would a boat “continue to sail the course” if there were no more legs in the course description? If F is the final mark in the course description there’s no next mark to sail to.

For a multi-lap course, a course of “S-W-L-F, two laps” would, I think, translate as “S-W-L-S/F-W-L-F”

In Andrew’s case above I think it’s necessary for the RC to keep track of which boats have completed how many laps - I’m not sure you can leave that up to the competitors to police. I expect if a boat forgets how many laps they’ve done it’s just as likely that they’ll do too many laps as too few.

The RO needs to know which lap each boat is on and, ideally, wait for all boats to sail the course.  Best practice is to record each time a boat crosses the finish line and which lap the RO believes they are on and to use the last crossing for scoring.  For boats that are laps behind, they may have to take their own time if the RC has gone in when they finish sailing the course.  This was something that happened to me more than once in my first years of racing, we were that slow.
 
In 2013 option (c) was added to the definition of finish as a part of changing the definition.  This made the ROs job a bit harder but alleviated the need for boats to understand that once they crossed the finish line they had finished and could not undo that.  This also happened to me once when the RO sent us on a 4 x W/L course for the last race of the day after already having done 2 other 2 x W/L races that day.  I crossed the finish line, which was above the windward mark, after the third lap.  All I could do was retire as I hadn't sailed the course properly.

The issue is … it is likely that the RC is unsure that the boat may have  just realized that they may have made an error in sailing the course .. and thus ACTUALLY have not completed the laps defined.

The new proposed case and mod to 28.2 makes this more clear …

Here is Peter’s link in clickable form. 

My previous comment contained the case submission.  There were a few changes and here is the link to the final approved version:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/qmt22gho7yu38wy/New%20case%20regarding%20finish.docx?dl=0    Peter

The revised definition of finish with the phrase about continuing to sal the course is, I think, the only time I have ever thought that an RRS change has been for the worse and made the rules more confusing. 

The "final approved version" still contains the error
"Boat X had made an error in sailing the course when she failed to leave mark 1 to port,"
The failure was in not leaving mark 2 to port.

Good catch Philip.

 I'll contact the chair and make them aware of it.
Peter

The above mentioned error and the sentence have been corrected. The case is listed as case 148 and has been added to the case book as a 2023 supplement.   Here is the link to Case 148  https://d7qh6ksdplczd.cloudfront.net/sailing/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/28112536/2023-Supplement-to-The-Case-Book-February-9-2023.pdf