Anti-cat

Hi Jim - yes this is true but it has to be said that on light wind evenings the cats are all well behind the monos and fighting to avoid last place. What makes it tolerable is that there is a biggish group (5-10) of Sprint 15s who take part (plus a couple of Prindle 15s & the odd Dart 18) and they can regard light wind evenings  (mentally) as a race against the other Catamarans. The payback comes on windy evenings when the Cats are very competitive. A well sailed 49er or 29er or IC, etc. howerer, remains competitive across a range of conditions so the cats are at an overall disadvantage. This is made more tolerable by having a big discard allowance on the series (best 7 results to count) so you can often disard more than half your results if you attend lots of the Wednesday Evenings.

Cheers

Bob

I think that there is no finer sight than a Tornado in full flight.  Happy to have them over taking me any day of the week!

Do these handicap races include 49ers and the like? At Ballyholme we all sail the same course in the winter (even in the summer we share half of the marks) so there's no reason why cats and mono can't share the same space. But the main problem with handicaps is that cats are so much faster than most monos. So do we sail the same course and finish 20minutes earlier than the rest of you? Or run average lap times?

In the past when we had a 49er fleet we used to race against them because putting a 49er in a handicap race against, say, a Laser is equally meaningless.

The other problem with putting cats against monos is that there aren't proper PY returns for most cats. We race off the formula-based SCHRS because there just aren't enough cats to give decent PY returns. What many do is take those Cats that do have a PY and extrapolate against the SCHRS numbers to give a PY equivalence. Not sure if that would be legal though in large open handicap events.