Organizing a Pursuit Race

I now live in Canada where pursuit races are almost unheard of. I remember they were a lot of fun in the UK but I cannot remember some of the details on how to organize one. I read the thread on timing a pursuit race but how do you calculate the start times and how do you finish it exactly on the hour? We normally use shore based starts and finishes but I assume you need a committee boat to finish and how do you finish if some boats are beating? Do you need more than one boat to record all the finishing positions if the boats are spread out?

Any comments would be helpful

Thanks

You should be able to find standard times for this on the web somewhere I would hope.  Basically you decide how long the race would be (say 100 or 200) minutes and then work out at what point each boat should start to (in theory) finish at the same time.

So 100 minute race. to finish at 13:40.

Boat with a handicap of 1000 starts at midday, a boat with a handicap of 900 starts later as it's faster, boat of handicap 1100 starts before midday as it is slower.

Simple Excel spreadsheet would be able to calc the appropiate start times.