You've gotten the "word." Touching the mark is an absolute, like being pregnant. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. There are no varying shades of gray.
The RRS are a good read. People have made entire careers out of interpreting them, however. To make things more complicated, every several years, they are modified to make them fairer or clearer--or none of the above.
Several sailmakers put out rules quizzes. They, too, are worth reading. Better to try to understand the rules in the comfort of your den than out on the race course, where a million other things are happening at the same time.
I am a writer, and several years ago I was doing a story about one of this country's better-known learn-to-race schools. It's Florida based, as am I. There were three students on a boat. One instructor. I had been racing for 25 years at the time I went through the course. On the second day, when I was first offered a chance to steer the boat, we did a series of three races. There were three boats competing, all identical. In the second race, I asked the other two students if they wanted to try a port tack start. They said it was okay for them. So we set up for a port tack start. The other two boats were starting on starboard, which meant they had the right of way. It's natural to be a little late for the start, and I hoped the other two boats would be. They were. It was close, though. We nailed them at the start and as we went by the buoy at the committee boat end, we hit the buoy's anchor line with our keel, but we never touched the buoy.
"That's a foul," said the instructor.
"No, it's not," I replied. We continued racing and won the race, the only time our boat ever won a race. The next morning, one of the officials of the sailing school showed up and told me I was "off the boat."
It is always good to know the rules. Sometimes it is not so good to know the rules better than your instructor.
Oddly, four years later, when I was in the sailing school's general location, on another matter, I stopped in and talked to one of the instructors, an older guy who was all bluster and BS. He didn't know the RRS of sailing any better than the sprout who had said, "That's a foul." And this was after I had written and published a story which included the hitting-the-mark's-anchor-line scenario.
Learn the RRS. Trust yourself. Often times the opinions you get on what can be complicated conundrums are worth just what you pay for them.
Morgan Stinemetz