I always thought that DPN was for Default Portsmouth Number, as in what you use when for whatever reason you don't use the wind corrected numbers.

As far as PHRF goes, one thing that seems to enter into it is a political factor from the people that maintain it for the various regions.

As far as handicap racing in general goes, it seems to be a great way to build up participation. Yes, one-design is going to give you a better test of skills adn ability to keep your boat tuned to some nth degree, but as evidenced from the popularity of week-night PHRF racing for monos in our area, there's a lot of people enjoying this type of racing.

It's working for our Fleet. Weeknight racing using DPN. While it's not as pure as OD, we've gone from an average of 5 boats on the line to 15 over the last couple of years. That's on an every Tuesday night basis. Our high has been 20. Now within the boats on the start are various groupings of same-class boats that can bash on each other as well as everybody else.

But the thing about it is that the handicap racing we do on Tuesdays is not the end of the involvement for racing for our skippers. I have always felt that strong clubs such as ours can feed the other racing in general, be it OD or handicap, bouy or distance. Out of our club the I20, H20, A-Cat, and N6.0 classes have more presence and can gain in strength.

Not everybody wants to join in all of the various types of racing, and you'll go crazy trying to convince them all they should do one form or the other of racing that somebody deems superior. But if you can get (and increase) a large enough pool of sailors in some common ground, there will be a percentage that will go off and fill the other niches as well.

PHRF seems to work well for the monos - but you get the same carping and bitching about ratings that you'll get with any handicap racing from the people that like to carp and bitch. My understanding is that committee somehow knows the distance of the courses, and that feeds into the calculation of finish times.