Personal Handicap

Being a member of the same club as AndyMcK (and also being on the sailing committee) I am reading this with interest.

The club does have the bandit issue with one particular class of boat which does seem to win everything. The RYA are gradually altering the yardstick the problem is that the guys who sail them are all of a pretty high standard. Now some would argue that they are the fastest sailors so they should win however this does not encourage Fred who would like to be competitive but just does not have the ability or the boat.

Personally I think it is a good idea. Just form the discussion the guy who suggested we try personal handciaps started a pursuit race 40 points quicker than his boats handicap and still won the race by over 2 minutes!

Paul

Thanks for all the help, the background to the decision to explore how to implement a personal handicap are as follows.

 We are aware that we can change the handicap of the problem fleet, and we are working on a change that is acceptable to the whole of the class. The problem being, as outlined above, that we know from open and national results that the general standard in that fleet is pretty good, but there is still a potential spread of 60 points between the boats. This means that a class correction will either still not make the series competative (we do have several current and past national champs in other fleets) for the leading phantom, or make it impossible for the other members of the fleet to be competative.

The data from our club suggests that a competative phantom with a 80-85kg helm should be sailing off about 950 on our water, using a well sailed laser as the bench mark, once you put a more normal sized phantom helm in the boat you are looking at 1020-1030, obviously on more open water or larger courses the situation changes considerably, due to the weight needed to drive a phantom once up to speed.

With such a wide diversity of performance, although all good yachters in their conditions, which is a much bigger spread than all the other fleets in the dinghy park. In order to maintain dinghy park harmony,a degree of personal handicapping seems the best way forward, and could be applied to the scratch series as well. This would potentially be awarded as a seperate prize for the same series, very much along the ozzy model, but gives more than the three or four phantoms a chance, and therefore hopefully increase turnouts, which due partly to demoralisation has seen a drop in the "all in" series.

We dont want to replace PY handicaping at our club, so the main series would still be done on that basis, but do hope to increase the appeal accross the board, and at the moment we are still in the discussion phase, hence the need to find out how it is done elsewhere.

 

 

Have a look at this page.

http://www.stonesc.co.uk/SSC_handicap.html

Stone SC have the Phantom on 994.

Originally posted by Scooby_simon Originally posted by Medway Maniac Have a look at this page. http://www.stonesc.co.uk/SSC_handicap.html Stone SC have the Phantom on 994.   Linky no worky !

 

Try http://www.stonesc.co.uk/SSC_handicap_page.html

The commitee at hunts are looking at the handicap issues, and this is one of the options being looked at. I was just asked to put forward a suggestion of how a personal handicap system might be implemented, which has now been done, if it gets tried, and seems to work in the long term, I will let you all know what we did, still al very much in the discussion stage.

 

Andy