Dart 15 Forums

At Shanklin this year we want to try to get all the boats in a race finished inside about 10 minutes from first to last, and to do this we hope to get every one up to speed by the end of the season, but are going to try lap average at the start of the year and would like to know if any club is doing this and how well it works.

Hi Erling
At Grafham all the Club racing and many of the open meetings are decided based on average lap times. It works really well. Sailwave Results software can do it automatically if you know how to set it up.
Cheers
Bob
PS Don't forget to stick the numbers on the 2007 sail

Hi Erling,

I don?t know if this is applicable to your question but when you mention the word average I must report that Bob had better than average luck at Grafham last week.

In the morning race in a howling wind he was in second place, a good 100m behind Chris who on the last beat tacked towards the wrong mark letting guess who nick first place. His above average luck carried on to the afternoon race, when again lying in second in a dying wind an asymmetric capsized and drifted on to the race leader allowing Mr lucky trousers to go on and win yet another gifted race!!!

Erling

Up north we go for the high tec solution of calculator screwed to the race sheet board & use a simple sum to calculate corrected times. None of that flash computer stuff for us... nothing to plug 'em into anyway!

It would be interesting to compare results, although we'd have to allow for your higher salinity levels, otherwise known as thick water and also thick air.

On the other hand our cold water might offset your salinity but ofcourse being nearer the jetstreams our lighter air moves faster...

Maybe we won't bother.

Charles.

Erling,

QM runs its summer Wednesday Evening series on this basis.

At my previous club we ran all "round the cans" races on the average time per lap basis. Race Officers were given discretion when (in the time sense) to start finishing boats, with advice on when to do it sensibly (eg try not to split boats in the same racing class, remember it's the slow boats that you don't want to have just let pass when you do start finishing boats, don't delay finishing when the wind is dying, etc) It worked well, coping with a range from Hurricane 5.9 to Europe (if that's slower than a Laser).

But ROs MUST satisfactorily log boats through each lap in a clear manner, to avoid ensuing problems sorting out the errors due to mis-recording of the number of laps sailed by boats.

When I'm QM RO on a Weds Evening, I record the times of every boat through every lap (sometimes I'll omit this on the first lap for some boats when boats tend to come in batches, sometimes large in the case of Lasers. This then gives me a record from which I can get a very good idea of when I should start finishing boats.

Catch me at QM if you have any queries, want any suggestions.

Frank wrote:

"I don?t know if this is applicable to your question but when you mention the word average I must report that Bob had better than average luck at Grafham last week. ..................etc".


Frank is just jealous that he does not get the same respect on the race course as some of his race chums. Now if we were to go into better than average luck we should be asking Frank about all the little favours he gets from the ladies in the Grafham Kitchen. His own coffee cup twice as big as the rest, special large portions of all the grub, laying on apple pie and custard as a special favour - even when it is not on the menu and much more besides!!!!!!!

No wonder Frank has the ballast to deal with the heavy winds we have been getting lately!!!!!!!!

At Shanklin we already use Sailwave for the results.
But there again my mate Ervin would have normaly worked out each boats finishing time in his head before he comes ashore!!! Only to make sure he isn't last

We use average lap times at Thorpe Bay. All the cats start together, and the course is usually shortened for everyone, after about 90 minutes. We have done this for many years, where the cats were given square courses. But this area has become a bit of a problem.

In the days when there were no asymmetric spinnakers, we all enjoyed the square courses. But these days, many cats will have asymmetric spinnakers, eg H 5.9s, spitfires, shadows, FX1s etc. These classes will want deeper leward courses, which will upset the Sprints, Dart 18s etc. which want square ones.

Andrew.