Jack

Wouter's major improvement over the existing Texel formula at them time was to define two wind ranges. The idea was that if 50 % of the boats were trapping out going upwind then you would use the second rating and vice versa.

Portsmouth currently uses Dpn 2 and 3 as one band for the rating. The newer design boats start to fly a hull in Beufort 3 and with spinaker's now in use... they are flying a hull down wind as well. This is non linear performance and we can't capture this in the small amount of data currently collected.

At the time Wouter was working on his system, he also had many technical calls that fall out of the engineering and was periodically consulting with Nico Boon and others in the Texel world with his ideas. Somehow, Texel changed their mind and decided to revisit the forumla and published their revised tables. I believe they incorporated a large number of the fixes that Wouter was using. My memory is that Wouter and I discussed the politics of bringing out a new rating system and since Texel had moved quite substantially towards the NMBR rating, it was not really worth it.

ISAF SCHRS also existed but the rule had not been updated in years and was much less popular then texel. A year later, Following the lead of TEXEL, the ISAF ratings were taken over by Scooby who led a signficant reworking of the ISAF ratings. Unlike NMBR and the Texel rating. ISAF SCHRS does not use a trap... no trap or windspeed two part formula.

The EU has no history of using a wind strength adjusted rating system. The difficulties in getting a Race Committee to move from a single number rating to multiple ratings is enormous. Only one software race scoring package will allow you to do this (Sailwave). All of the "simple" race scoring programs would require you to reload an entire new rating table. Race Commmittes just are not quick to switch race scoring programs... (Hey... it worked last year... It will be just fine... this year as well). The US is much happier using the best scoring program out there.. sailwave and we are used to using windspeed ratings for buoy races.

Distance races where the conditions could vary widely need a different solution.

As Wouter worked through the ratings, I tested the system on a few years of data collected by CRAC (forwarded to USPN since I was on the committe). It was a bit dicey because I had to remember whether an event was a high beaufort 3 race with 1/2 the boats trapping or not. I concluded the system was workable and did a good job of scoring the races. By good job... I value the experience and track record of the helm and expect the results to reasonably follow the sailor and less the boat. The modified ratings tables that Wouter generated were put into Sailwave and did a great job of scoring the races.

So, Where are we at:

1) for any measurement rating system, we will need to measure some US specific boats... actual physical measurements are required. Currently neither the New texel or the new isaf SCHRS can be used in the US without a Wild butt Guess at some ratings.

2) the US Shark is a tough boat for a measurement rating system to deal with. It's such and old school boat that it doesn't rate well.

3) A large amount of work goes into creating a portsmouth system or a measurment system and toes will be stepped on with any change from one to another. Texel led the way with a measurement based rating system and it quickly gained acceptance outside of the Texel race. Later, ISAF sanctioned a french effort to create the competing rating system. It's hard to see the value in a third rating system ... just because us Yanks wanted to be different. The world wide multihull council put this issue on the agenda. I would support a world wide system implemented in the US.

4) One feature that I think a system that the US would support uses at least two wind ranges for ratings. A single rating like the standard DPN should also be available for clubs that can't deal with a ratings table.

5) For what its' worth, I have a an easy to use finish time / sail number program that I use which makes recording and caluclating the results very simple. (It's used at Key West and on the Chesapeake for the big events.)

6)We should keep reporting to US Portsmouth since some clubs have a reason to score cat's with monohull dinghy's.

7) Even One design fleets benefit from seeing finish time deltas' rather then just finish positions. It lets a sailor have a real information as they try to improve their sailing.


Mark Schneider