Club Cruiser Racing

[Channel Sailor]

Maybe NHC works for an occasional club fun race to have some kind of benchmark to make it feel like you are racing and be able to join in. Then if you enjoy the fun, then in my case VPRS does the job (so far).

 

[lw395]

Maybe NHC works for an occasional club fun race to have some kind of benchmark to make it feel like you are racing and be able to join in. Then if you enjoy the fun, then in my case VPRS does the job (so far).

That's the paradox.
NHC can only work as intended after lots of races to 'correct' the handicap.

Personally, I enjoy racing and I'm not too bothered about the results.
If you have to look at the results before you can say you've enjoyed your day on the water, you're getting it all wrong. I'm happy to come last on paper, having learned something or just had a blast or put work out of my mind for a couple of hours.

 

[Chris 249]

That's the paradox.
NHC can only work as intended after lots of races to 'correct' the handicap.

Personally, I enjoy racing and I'm not too bothered about the results.
If you have to look at the results before you can say you've enjoyed your day on the water, you're getting it all wrong. I'm happy to come last on paper, having learned something or just had a blast or put work out of my mind for a couple of hours.

It's not a matter of being bothered to win a tin pot - it's just a feeling that it's wrong when people who sail a slower boat well don't get their just rewards and recognition. One other thing that's noticeable when you live somewhere where NHC-style racing is the most common form is that very few people actually know how fast their own boat potentially is compared to the opposition (unlike systems where they have a reliable rating) so they never really have a way to measure whether they are getting better or not. It's also hard when you switch clubs, since NHC-style handicaps from one club are rarely aligned with that of other clubs. It makes regatta results just a matter of luck.

There's certainly a place for NHC style systems, but having spent my life cursing them it does seem that if they are the only popular system they can have a bad effect on the sport. If they are run in tandem with another system that rewards good sailing, it's different. The Americans seem to do a good job of running yardstick style systems with PHRF and the French do it with HN, so it seems odd that the RYA had to abandon PY for cruisers. As I understand it the problem was that they tried to count each variant of each design separately, but in the USA they tend to try to rate the basic design and then allocate adjustments for variation such as roller furling, different headsail sizes, different props etc. That would seem to provide a better system for the creation of cruiser/racer yardsticks.

 

[Praxinoscope]

I know it had its problems but I quite liked PY, we used it for years and although there were always some arguements (But there are no matter what H/C you adopt) it did give us a very varied range of winners over the years.
Although my golfing friends (I don’t see the fun in chasing a little white ball around, but my cat does) tell me the NHC has similarities to golf H/C which apparently do work, I am not 100% convinced that NHC is better than PY.

 

[Birdseye]

Playing around with numbers from last weekend race, the spread between winner and last boat in the IRC lot was 11.3% and the same calculation for the NHC lot was 11.7%. So just as close racing.

As for varied winners, the current series finished last year gave us 8 different race winners in 11 races of NHC. In the IRC fleet there were 5 different winners in the same number of races but the IRC fleet is half the size of the NHC one.

For all the snootiness of the IRC fans, racing doesn see, just as close in either handicap, with the IRC one rewarding money spent and the NHC one rewarding week by week improvement.

 

[lw395]

Playing around with numbers from last weekend race, the spread between winner and last boat in the IRC lot was 11.3% and the same calculation for the NHC lot was 11.7%. So just as close racing.

As for varied winners, the current series finished last year gave us 8 different race winners in 11 races of NHC. In the IRC fleet there were 5 different winners in the same number of races but the IRC fleet is half the size of the NHC one.

For all the snootiness of the IRC fans, racing doesn see, just as close in either handicap, with the IRC one rewarding money spent and the NHC one rewarding week by week improvement.

It's probably best to set aside the bottom half of the fleet. People whose corrected times are 10% slower than you are not in the race. No yardstick system is going to make a worthwhile race if you've got that kind of disparity.
There is a problem that however good IRC is as a rating system, the standard of club yacht sailing is often pretty low.
Plus of course a lot of club yacjt racing is in very tidal areas, where 'going the wrong way' is disastrous.
I sailed a couple of PY races at the weekend, top half of our fleet was within a minute after an hour's race. A couple of old rivals battling it out in the same class of boat, changing places, yet other classes got between them in the results. This of course was in dinghies.

 

[Praxinoscope]

It's probably best to set aside the bottom half of the fleet. People whose corrected times are 10% slower than you are not in the race. No yardstick system is going to make a worthwhile race if you've got that kind of disparity.
There is a problem that however good IRC is as a rating system, the standard of club yacht sailing is often pretty low.
Plus of course a lot of club yacjt racing is in very tidal areas, where 'going the wrong way' is disastrous.
I sailed a couple of PY races at the weekend, top half of our fleet was within a minute after an hour's race. A couple of old rivals battling it out in the same class of boat, changing places, yet other classes got between them in the results. This of course was in dinghies.

Surely the use of tides is as much part of racing as setting ones sails and ‘following’ the wind, so the use of tide tables and for club racing local knowledge of oddities in current flows is as important as crew ability, and yacht design, this is why handicap racing can throw up different winners. We have one 22 mile race where if you miss rounding the mark by not judging the current correctly (a measure of seamanship) you can lose anything between 10 and 50 minutes on getting round it. Entries usually include Super Seals, Fulmars, Sadler 29’s, Sadler 32, Achilles 24’s, and various other classes, and to be fair the Fulmars or Super Seals have more wins, but they aren’t always, and winners have included Sadler 25, Invicta 26 and even a Seawych. Cruiser racing is more than just Kevlar sails and self tailing winches, but without some form of handicapping most club racing would would vanish which would seem to me a great pity.
As for standard of club racing being low, so what? Village cricket, tennis, football etc. wouldn’t compete at county or national level, it doesn’t matter, it’s the fun of joining in and mucking about on the water, if you get a cup or plaque at the end of it great, but it’s that adreniline you get when you have been shadowing that other yacht for the last 3 hours or so, the line is coming up and if you can just point a fraction higher you might just shave enough seconds off your elapsed time and in turn corrected time to beat them.
That’s the whole ethos of handicap racing, it gives the chance to those who don’t have bottomless pockets or want a boat that is good for cruising, but can still be raced ocasionally to join in club events and now and again and perhaps get an award at the end of the club regatta or a presentation at the annual dinner dance.

 

[Birdseye]

Surely the use of tides is as much part of racing as setting ones sails and ‘following’ the wind, so the use of tide tables and for club racing local knowledge of oddities in current flows is as important as crew ability, and yacht design, this is why handicap racing can throw up different winners. We have one 22 mile race where if you miss rounding the mark by not judging the current correctly (a measure of seamanship) you can lose anything between 10 and 50 minutes on getting round it. Entries usually include Super Seals, Fulmars, Sadler 29’s, Sadler 32, Achilles 24’s, and various other classes, and to be fair the Fulmars or Super Seals have more wins, but they aren’t always, and winners have included Sadler 25, Invicta 26 and even a Seawych. Cruiser racing is more than just Kevlar sails and self tailing winches, but without some form of handicapping most club racing would would vanish which would seem to me a great pity.
As for standard of club racing being low, so what? Village cricket, tennis, football etc. wouldn’t compete at county or national level, it doesn’t matter, it’s the fun of joining in and mucking about on the water, if you get a cup or plaque at the end of it great, but it’s that adreniline you get when you have been shadowing that other yacht for the last 3 hours or so, the line is coming up and if you can just point a fraction higher you might just shave enough seconds off your elapsed time and in turn corrected time to beat them.
That’s the whole ethos of handicap racing, it gives the chance to those who don’t have bottomless pockets or want a boat that is good for cruising, but can still be raced ocasionally to join in club events and now and again and perhaps get an award at the end of the club regatta or a presentation at the annual dinner dance.

Well said!.

 

[Birdseye]

It's probably best to set aside the bottom half of the fleet. People whose corrected times are 10% slower than you are not in the race. No yardstick system is going to make a worthwhile race if you've got that kind of disparity.

There are lots of ways of trimming the data to give different pictures. I could use the inter quartile range which is a standard statistical tool. But all I was trying to say was that NHC racing at club level is just as tight as IRC racing - or at least it is at our club.

There is a problem that however good IRC is as a rating system, the standard of club yacht sailing is often pretty low.
Plus of course a lot of club yacjt racing is in very tidal areas, where 'going the wrong way' is disastrous.
I sailed a couple of PY races at the weekend, top half of our fleet was within a minute after an hour's race. A couple of old rivals battling it out in the same class of boat, changing places, yet other classes got between them in the results. This of course was in dinghies.

I sailed an NHC race at the weekend and miserable it was in the cold and wet and with little wind. Even worse in dinghies I would have thought. Our top half spread was more like 3 minutes in 80 but we had boats that differed in handicap by 20% and in strong tidal waters at that. The fastest finisher was a J24, the slowest on handicap was a 36ft cruiser weighing 3 times as much. No handicap will cope with those sort of weight and tide differences, and with no boat reaching hull speed for half the race..

 

[Hayling]

Lots of interesting thoughts and replies, thank you, We are a rag tag bag of miscreants for our Thursday evening races,
but what we all have in common is a love of being on the water and a short thrash around the buoys give us a reason to get out mid week and the club kitchen opens to feed us a pie to go with our pint and excuses!
That is also why we tried the bang and about format, and whilst it may not suit 'proper' racers, it does seem to suit our little flotilla, dependent on time, tide and wind, someone different wins most weeks and as the first shall be last and the last first, we all have a crack at leading and following.
I think we shall stick with it, unless someone has a better idea.....?

 

[Birdseye]

Do whatever works for you in your club. There is absolutely no reason why you cant invent your own rules - you dont even need to stick to RRS if you dont want to do. You could do what I have wondered about which is putting a MoB recovery under sail in the middle of your race. Or you could do a floating "treasure hunt".

 

[Praxinoscope]

Do whatever works for you in your club. There is absolutely no reason why you cant invent your own rules - you dont even need to stick to RRS if you dont want to do. You could do what I have wondered about which is putting a MoB recovery under sail in the middle of your race. Or you could do a floating "treasure hunt".

A couple of regattas back I did just that, we had a past commodores race where we introduced a couple of unusual hazards, one of them was a MOB drill, just glad I was OOD that time as I would have drowned if I had been one of the cushions they had to retrieve.