Courses - fast fleets at Grafham open

The powers at be are planning the courses for the Cat open are Grafham.  I believe that last year it got a bit busy on the fast course and so we are looking for ideas and to see if classes would consider deviating from strict W/L courses.

For those that don’t know we have the following numbers on the fast fleet:

Fast handicap fleet (small last year, may be bigger this)
Hurricane 5.9 (15)
Fast single hander (29)
F18 (21)
Spitfire (18)

Lake shape allows for w/l course of approx 1 mile in all wind directions.

Last year, there was a fair bit of congestion at the leeward mark, we are trying to improve this for this year; we are not sure a gate will really help.

Last year it was W/L course  (A to B and thru the line ?---CTB, line ranked as an obstruction down wind)

A

?-------CTB

B

Options for next year are adding extra windward (or leeward marks) or adopting the course used at Eurocat

AA         &nbs p;         &nbs p;         &nbs p;   A

BB                                    ?B
                                           \
                                             \
                                               \
                                              CTB

Distance between A->AA and BB->B can be about 300m
Course might be for 2 fleets
Fleet 1:
Start, A, AA, BB, AA, BB, AA,etc..., BB, B, ?--Finish

Fleet 2:

Start, A, B, A, B, A, etc, B, ?--Finish

But this would need 2 fleets do move away from strictly W/L courses

The problem with the above is that it is difficult to shorten as you need an extra boat at BB to flag it (might be difficult if it’s howling as there are also another 110+ boats on the “slow” cat course, so we won't have "spare" safety boats).  And on Sunday there will also be around 100 boats club racing.

Has anyone else got suggestions ?

Cheers

Simon

Is this a change in requirements as last year there was no leeward gate ?

We will not cancel club racing.

But the thing is in this case there is still a problem, as how do you split the fleets?

F18 Hcap is 1.005; Spitfiure 1.035, Hurricane 1.007 / 1.009 and Handicap 1.07 to 0.98ish