More trivia
Recalls -- a necessary nuisance....
When you can plainly pick out the over - early boat(s) and hail them by number, then the onus is on them to return to the other side of the line and make their proper start. They will have to give way to other starters while doing this trip. OTOH, the old racing saying goes that if you are not "over early" once or twice a season you are not trying hard enough!
If they do not choose to return and properly start, write down their numbers and remember that they do not get a finish horn or "over" called because they did not rank as a starter...
It's a hard lesson, but most of us only need one lesson...
A "general recall" happens when there are so many boats over early that the RC cannot honestly hail all the offenders and so puts up the general recall signal and makes the appropriate noise to let that group know that they must do it over. Quite a few years ago the clubs in my area decided that any start subject to this would *not* cause a delay for the other classes, and adopted the scheme of having the recalled start go, in minute sequence, after all other scheduled starts. Milling around for 20 or 30 minutes while everyone else started usually caused them to tame their aggression a bit.
As to notifying an individual boat or a whole group, that's a duty of the RC, and the general instructions for your event will cover this. Along with the proper color flags for preparatory and starting, I always have the recall flag laid out on the cabin top for instant use if needed.
After the starts are all away, we in our little sailing area sometimes have to contend with dying breezes in the summer -- and that leads to decisions about shortening course. If we have enough RC crew we send the mark boat down to our chosen mark-of-the-course and have them fly the shorten course flag and conduct finishes for any classes that due to sail restriction or boat size are unlikely to make it back to us to finish within the time limit.
I don't know about the rest of you guys and gals, but as a competitor I just hate to sail the boat intensively in a dying breeze and finally fail to make the finish line within the time limit... and "waste" the evening!
And, FWIW, it's no fun for the RC folks to preside over an evening or afternoon of massive DNF's, either.
Perhaps you have steadier winds than us, so that finishing is usually assumed; I hope so.
Note that a lot of my so-called advice will be disregarded or perhaps validated by the Race Instructions and Supplemental Race Instructions that your club uses.
This advice may worth even less than the usual $.01 !
Best,
Loren