Anti-cat

At Grafham there are no problems whatsoever having cats and monohulls racing together on the same course. And in the Wednesday evening handicap races using Fast, Medium and Slow Fleets, the boats sailing include Hurricanes, Dart 18s, Sprint 15s, 49ers, Assy Canoes, RS 6 and 700s, Flying Fifteens, Lasers, Solos,and down to Picos and Toppers.
And a Sprint 15 won the Fast Fleet Series in 2006 against the fast monohulls although normally one of the latter usually wins it.       

Originally posted by foaminatthedeck I have limited experence of racing cats and mono on the same course but I found the experence of being overtaken by a number of Tornado s on a beam reach a most unpleasent experence that I'm not keen to repeat,  I was in the contender so not that slow but the T comming past just went to close for my comfort.  So much so that I think it might put me off a join cat mono open meeting,

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!

 

Originally posted by Jimbob At Grafham there are no problems whatsoever having cats and monohulls racing together on the same course. And in the Wednesday evening handicap races using Fast, Medium and Slow Fleets, the boats sailing include Hurricanes, Dart 18s, Sprint 15s, 49ers, Assy Canoes, RS 6 and 700s, Flying Fifteens, Lasers, Solos,and down to Picos and Toppers. And a Sprint 15 won the Fast Fleet Series in 2006 against the fast monohulls although normally one of the latter usually wins it.

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

Edited by Sprint Bob

I think the point is that every club - and a club is hopefully just a grouping of vaguely likeminded people - has a right - even duty - to do what is regarded as best for those people to have fun sailing.

There are whole hosts of different restrictions at different clubs to suit their own requirements. The club where I sail prohibits Catamarans (but not the narrow Laser Vortex or Fun boat) and B14s because they don't fit through the water company gates onto the reservoir, any kind of keelboat because the weight is too much for our access winch, two string boats because there are concerns that the visibility is too limited on a moderate sized reservoir with a lot of crossing upwind and downwind, and sailboards are not permitted on the water on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, but are welcome at other times.

There are clubs and events that are restricted to boats faster than a given speed, boats slower than a given speed, events and clubs that are restricted to particular classes, all sorts of things. At UK inland clubs keelboats and sailboards are probably as widely restricted as catamarans, and kite surfers are almost universally banned. The special requirements of kite surfers, catamarans and keelboats make it easy to understand why they are limited. The restrictions on sailboards are perhaps less easy to justify.



Edited by JimC

Originally posted by JimC The restrictions on sailboards are perhaps less easy to justify.

At Grafham we let the sailboards take part but exclude them from the series results. Most sailboarders do not race so we just get the odd one racing. If we got a group do a series we would award seperate prizes. The reason for this is in light winds they pump around the course, in strong winds they change their rig, etc so it is impossible to give them an appropriate PY that can be justified to the rest of the sailors who sail under different rules.