RRS A7: boats tied in a race share the points for the places they occupy, so two boats tied for 3rd and 4th take (3+4)/2 = 3.5 each and the next boat is 5th.
A scratch fleet's finish order is the order of the rows on the sheet, and the tie used to be read off a per-row flag alone — never off the times. The flag is set by hand from a checkbox the sheet suppresses on a timed row, so on a timed sheet a tie could be neither derived nor marked: it simply could not be expressed. The handicap path has always done it correctly, grouping a tie on equal corrected time, so the same race came out tied in a fleet's ECHO result and split in its scratch result.
Rows are timed here for the reason the report describes: a boat also in a handicap fleet with a start time gets a timed row on the scratch sheet too, which is exactly when a dual-scored boat's scratch tie stops being markable.
A time of day is whole seconds by construction and absolute, so equal strings are a tie — no precision question and no start question. (An elapsed time can carry a fraction and is only comparable within a start; that is decided at the race's timing precision, per ADR-007 as amended.)
Scoring configuration: No discards. DNF/OCS scoring: A5.2 (series entries).
Charlie and Anna crossed together — the committee boat wrote one time
against both, which is what a dead heat looks like on a paper sheet.
Race points: 1, 2, 3.5, 3.5, 5 — the two tied boats take the average of the
places they occupy, and Echo is 5th, not 4th.