Racing quality

Originally posted by NickM Graeme, as Commodore at Hythe, why don't you persuade your Sailing Committee to come up with locally suitable variations of the PY scheme as other clubs do?

I will endeavour to get them to form a "sailing committee" to review this latest debacle, but since it's taken us windsurfers this long to teach them how to race properly, I can't see them having the political will to over rule centuries of RYA domination, they are just not aware. I had a conversation on Sunday with the Commodore from the club that is a bit more switched on at the Redoubt where they do adjust handicaps, they've moved me to 1036 and I'd not even realised, they use some sort of programme that works it out for you, but clearly it doesn't work any better, wether I'm first or last I still end up seventh if I even bother to find out and if it did work I would feel even more inadequate so I'm not really the person to argue the case for personal handicaps. Winning because they changed my handicap advantageously would be worse than the worse last place or humiliating rescue by woman that has ever befallen my sad ass down that lake.

Equipment performance differences are understandable, but a golfing style approach is not what sailing is about imv. I want an accurate fact based boat performance index. Something that proves that the Blaze is actually faster than the EPS because it has more volume and more sail area and that the Phantom sits just in between most of the time because although it gets going in light it doesn't quite have the righting moment of the Blaze once the wind picks up. Not a system that is governed by who happens to be sailing what & where, or how many of them and wether or not they report the fact every so often.

Waterline length, volume, sail area and aspect ratio, righting moment, rocker and wetted surface define how fast a boat is, not how many hotshots or muppets make returns, there's a place for that sort of thing, but it's not reality and unless you have actual reality you get the mess you have now, with a swirling chaos of numerics with no null point anchoring them.

Edited by iGRF - 03 Mar 14 at 8:25am

What was it Churchill said about democracy?

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.