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 ?

Simon

From memory last year the two areas that I thought maybe needed addressing were : -
a) Overlapping of courses on Sunday when the club racing was taking place - thus we had fast boats screaming downwind getting tangled up with slow boats heading up their beat. 
b) Leeward mark was a bit busy which might have been alleviated had there been a gate rather than a single mark.
Of the two points above I would have said the former was more key to fix as a highspeed upwind/downwind collision is going to hurt more than just the boat.

Adrian.

You could always cancel club racing for the weekend (like some other clubs) and let the committee know that a Vortex is a mono-hull.  Might create some room...and debate!!!

We will not cancel club racing.

i seem to recall 2 years ago the wind was from a different direction and there was a lot more room.

can you just arrange that direction?

would 2 leeward marks (one upwind a bit from the other) for different speed boats help?

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

ok i should have said different classes

maybe spitfires and hurricanes sail slightly shorter course, either to windward or leeward?

definately was a leeward gate and a spreader mark at top of course.

with the prevalence of spinnaker cats this is the ideal catamaran course for competive racing with no let ups and is what modern cats are designed for .

Don't recollect any serious congestion other than would normally be encountered  other than the problems of overlapping course on the Sunday

I was not on the "fast" course last year as I'd sold the Inter 17 and was doing some comedy Dart 18 sailing.

There was a gate at the leeward mark.  My mistake.

LOL

Not only was there a leeward gate, but the start/finish line was to leeward of the gate. The finish was between the boat and the left gate bouy. that meant that the RC had trouble keeping count of laps and finished boats at odd times.

Keep the start/fin remote from the course so that the onus is on the sailors to count laps and leave the course to finish. everyone hates going through the start/fin on each windward leg and it means that the RC have to lap count for everyone.

i don't think that the fleets are split properly, it should not be on speed but on sailing habits - mixing spinny boats with non-spinny boats on the same busy course causes problems.