It is very hard for me to understand why everyone would not prefer to race against identical boats. To me it is a lot more exciting to race a Lightning one-design than catamarans on handicap.
Maybe it's because I was raised believing that sailboat racing is about determining who is the fastest sailor, not which is the fastest boat -- and that can only really be determined in a one-design fleet.
And if you think the fastest guy in a one-design fleet is only fastest because he has the fastest boat, you can have a race where everybody switches boats, with the fastest sailor taking the "slowest" boat in the fleet, and see what happens.
Maybe there are too many people these days who care more about having the fastest boat and don't care about improving their sailing/racing skills.
Maybe some people just don't want to know they are not as good as another sailor and would rather be able to blame it on their boat or on their handicap rating? I don't know. You tell me.
If you want to go fast and don't want to spend the time and energy to improve your skills, why don't you just get a personal watercraft? Want to go faster, just get one with a bigger engine.
Sorry, I am just frustrated because I don't understand it.
Mary,
I am with you 100%. While open class racing has its place, and I applaud all the efforts that go into collecting and calculating the Portsmouth numbers, I can’t understand why someone would want to sail under a number then boat for boat, if given the choice. (if that is what you are asking)
Yes, we would rather match race one other boat of same design then sail against a hodgepodge of 20 boats. We did it for almost a year on the H20 against Wick Smith. It was a true test of the skipper and crew’s abilities. We were equally skilled and equaled determined to out sail each other. When we hit the beach, we knew who had come out on top that day. We didn’t need to compute some numbers to tell us the outcome.
I don’t mean to stray from the subject, but I do sail in the F18 class, the class is in essence a form of the one-design concept. While the boats are of different manufacturer and may not be identical in everyway, they are where it matters and they share the same number.
While the F18 concept was conceived from elapsed time sailing, they could see that this was not fair racing and thus set out to create a better system. A single rating.
I think the aim of the creation of the F18 rule sums it up; "to provide fair racing for crews of various weights, from 115 to over 150 kgs, through the use of two different sail sizes of jibs and spinnakers, linked to the use of limited corrector weights ;" (I’ll note that this is just one of the reasons)
Tracie
