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Medway Maniac View Drop Down
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Posts: 2788 		Post Options Post Options   Quote Medway Maniac Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Personal Handicaps
    Posted: 18 Nov 14 at 6:50pm
Originally posted by Do Different

Okay. Stupid question, shoot me down in flames time. Why do designers make boats so buoyant?
Short answer: because it's cheap and looks good.

The problem lies in too-buoyant side tanks.  You can, of course, have separate double bottom and side decks, so that water can flood over the side-deck when you capsize and fill the space above the double bottom, so that the buoyancy is more in the centre of the boat.  That is impossible to create without two deck mouldings, however, which involves extra costs that builders are loath to incur.

JimC did once post a photo of a Cherub (I think) with almost no side tanks, but which provided adequate side-deck width by making the gunwale lip very wide.  It was not reported what sort of capsize performance it had.

It would be nice if builders bit the bullet and produced buoyancy arrangements as I've described, that allowed boats to self-drain yet float low on their side to reduce the risk of inversion and make it easy to get onto the board from the water, but the L2k and MkIV Wayfarer show they aren't doing it yet.  Maybe they are waiting for the first fatality.
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kneewrecker View Drop Down
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Posts: 1586 		Post Options Post Options   Quote kneewrecker Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18 Nov 14 at 7:14pm
Rupert - question for you... after reading that, would you let your son go out in one without safety cover?
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iGRF View Drop Down
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Posts: 6499 		Post Options Post Options   Quote iGRF Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18 Nov 14 at 7:19pm
It was my big design flaw with the V twin, but then I wasn't designing it to fall over in the first place, Interestingly the EPS has holes drilled in the racks so they sink a bit, but personally I'll take going in over the back over coming up in a bath tub like the Alto, which takes almost an entire leg to clear meaning 1 capsize in a race and your done.
It was an annoyance in the RS100, but that had other issues as well, not least its windward speed with its small sail, what's this got to do with handicaps and my national ranking idea..

Where do you think you'd place on such a thing?
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Rupert View Drop Down
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Posts: 8956 		Post Options Post Options   Quote Rupert Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18 Nov 14 at 7:42pm
Originally posted by kneewrecker

Rupert - question for you... after reading that, would you let your son go out in one without safety cover?


In the same places I let him go out without safety cover in the Lightning, yes. If anyone is going to be able to get back in a lightweight boat it is a capsize-skilled teenager.
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kneewrecker View Drop Down
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Posts: 1586 		Post Options Post Options   Quote kneewrecker Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18 Nov 14 at 7:44pm
Ok- fair enough :-)
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Rupert View Drop Down
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Posts: 8956 		Post Options Post Options   Quote Rupert Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18 Nov 14 at 7:44pm
Originally posted by iGRF



Where do you think you'd place on such a thing?


Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 way down is my guess for me.
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RS400atC View Drop Down
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Posts: 3011 		Post Options Post Options   Quote RS400atC Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18 Nov 14 at 7:45pm
1) there is a school of thought that an inverted boat is safer than one that blows away.
2) I don't know what the RCD says? I think it does not aply to racing only boats, but that's a small market, and new classes are so often looking for a slice of the training and beach holiday market.

For myself, I reckon it's usually quicker to right and drain a capsized Merlin than an inverted RS400.
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Chris 249 View Drop Down
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Posts: 2041 		Post Options Post Options   Quote Chris 249 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18 Nov 14 at 11:04pm
Down here, personal handicaps are used in most class races as well, and people do seem to get an extra buzz from a personal handicap win or place, on top of the buzz they get from simply finishing ahead of their normal place.

We used to do a bit of coaching at our old club and we actually enjoyed watching the handicaps of the whole fleet get closer to the scratch boat (us) as the standard of sailing improved. One of the things about the standard systems down here is that when the scratch boat does even better than usual and wins on personal handicap as well, everyone else in the fleet has their personal handicap increased. That means that instead of feeling crushed by the scratch boat dominating, the rest of the fleet get cheered up by getting a better handicap. It's not particularly logical, but IMHO trying to race A Class cats against Optis (which I've seen) is also not exactly logical racing.

Having a big handicap doesn't have to be seen as patronising - it's recognition of the fact that some people don't sail as fast because they have less experience, or have more important things than sailing to attend to in life and therefore can't train as hard. It's not much different from having a regular bet of a post-race beer with a friend of similar standard; no one seems to feel diminished if their personal bet (or simply personal rival) is close to the back of the fleet, so why feel diminished if your personal handicap is also close to the back of the fleet? It's not as if people don't know where you finish normally!

Sailing is very hard to learn and many sports are moving to a model that stresses a target set by the individual competitor rather than stressing a finishing position, so why shouldn't sailing do something similar? Don't many sporting clubs have a 'most improved competitor' prize at the annual prizegiving, and isn't personal handicapping just a more regular version of the same ideal?

A national system that set you a personal handicap on top of your boat's PY would be great to see; not the sort of thing our rather elitist national body down here will do. 





Edited by Chris 249 - 18 Nov 14 at 11:07pm
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Medway Maniac View Drop Down
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Posts: 2788 		Post Options Post Options   Quote Medway Maniac Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 24 Nov 14 at 11:20am
Originally posted by Medway Maniac

I'm becoming persuaded through this thread (there' a first!) that dual-scoring might be a good idea.  Golfers do seem to view improving <span style="line-height: 16.7999992370605px;">their </span>handicap as something motivating, after all.
That said, like Grumph, I don't think I'd feel I'd really won just because I'd been given an easier handicap, so I'd personally like a system in which the result was the absolute result on RYA PYs, but along with the result my current handicap got spat out, so that I could see how I was doing compared to my past performances.  
Sailwave can, of course, produce BCR numbers which show the PY you actually sailed to in a race (winner gets the boat's PY, the rest the PY they would have needed to win), but what I'm missing there is my average BCR hitherto to compare to.

Just bumping this, as I was hoping someone might be able to tell us how to get Sailwave to display an entry's average BCR for a series (or even better, over several series). I guess the answer is that you need to keep a separate spreadsheet, filled manually, but hope springs eternal...
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