After racing cats for several years now I feel the Portsmouth yard stick is good for a "ROUGH" measure of how you competed against other design boats. And I believe that is what it was designed for. Its not a "perfect" rating system that makes a fair race down to the wire for every make & model boat. I think a fair race could really only be done 1 design. Because all the boats perform different under different conditions & Different Level's of sailors
set the #'s by there racing results. Most of the regatta's
I go to its 8-20 boats all different makes and models.
Maybe 1 day the the sport will make a come back and
there will be enough boats at a regatta's that there can be 1 design fleets racing one another. Until then its a #'s game thats really not a fair playing field. But its what we got!

Ok Now let me know how you feel. I am right are am
I off base.

Doug Ramsey
TheMightyHobie18 #4383

That about sums it up....when you want to get very serious about racing one design is the place to be. No handicap system will ever be perfect.

yes I think that its fairly good (there are some notable exceptions for specific boats)...As long as similar boats are racing...So for eg, racing a h16 against an I20 will never work...My feeling is that there are three general groups of boats: low portsmouth without dagger boards, high portsmouth with daggers, and then high portsmouth, with daggers, and spinnaker.

Isn't it the opposite? High Portsmouth without daggers, low Portsmouth with daggers, and low Portsmouth with daggers and spinnaker?

Just a minor point of clarification to prevent confusion. It always throws me off, that the faster the boat the lower the Portsmouth number.

Don't do it if you can avoid it.


Ding

Somebody told me once :

"How can you claim the air tastes foul when it is the only thing you can breath".

Besides F18 is coming your way. Best compromise ever devised in Cat sailing

Wouter

uh, yes ok...

Well,

The world of big expensive monohulls are moving to portsmouth racing... They call it by a different name...
IRC I believe. AYC SFYC and all of the major US Clubs will be using it next season for the major big boat events.
Things like the Race to Bermuda, Key West RW,
You know... small insignficant events that you gather millions of dollars of boats for racing!

What is it. A single number time on time rating system... eg... the same as using the DPN in portsmouth.

The essential difference is that they use a model to predict boat speed based on the features you are using on your boat... AND a judgment factor for boats that appear to be rule beaters to compute your rating.

Oh yeah... its adopted world wide ( We are slow to wake up in the US)!

Now, I am sure that they would love to get 10 Farr XX's on the line... but they are a pain to trailer and so they go portsmouth racing most of the year.

I think that if your sailing skills are at the Olympic Level... you hold out and go one design racing... otherwise... just go racing.... the guys with 1/2 million plus invested are going Portsmouth(IRC) racing as well.
Finally, All of the vetching about the arms race in F18 sails and Tornado sails... pale in comparison to the arms race in these big mono racing boats; supposedly, this IRC rule will generate fair ratings to account for the race and grow the sport by getting participation from lots more sailors.

Got to agree with you...all we need here in Texas is a few more years so the supply of used boats is bigger - then we will be on our way to building a class - and once that happens we will have critical mass

Chris.

>>what is it. A single number time on time rating system... eg... the same as using the DPN in portsmouth.
>>The essential difference is that they use a model to predict boat speed based on the features you are using on your
>>boat... AND a judgment factor for boats that appear to be rule beaters to compute your rating.


Sound like a measurement based handicap system to me, Like Texel or SCHS (ISAF).

Seems these mono guys have taken a good look at what works in catamaran land. We should be proud.

Wouter

Hi Mark

Spent the last year or so just sailing locally with the kids ---chillin ,-as they say

Nice to see ,{in a strange way} ,things changing little and you defending P rating but still, though in decline, stubbornly clinging and insisting it is or should be applied in larger context other than informal local club racing ,-it is ideal for small diverse groups of boats for local club racing ,-which is the only alternative some have in their area, and its only real application ,-or should be .

you noted the following --
copy--{The essential difference is that they {mono classes}use a model to predict boat speed based on the features you are using on your boat... AND---end quote -

comment ---this design measurement model serves as the basis for rating numbers and is the priority factor in determining a boats rating number --the time on time as per P rating is factored secondarily to it .

You will always have it {bass ackwards }.
In attempting to {make it fair and equal in competitive sport per time allowance rewards for slower sailors ,regardless of brand name boat ,-all you really accomplish is making it uncompetive and unfair .

The problem is the negative effects of rewarding mediocrity which in turn inevitably leads to failing to continue to strive through direct competition which as we all recognize provides the incentive to develop and grow .
Are college students graded on how well they happen to be comprehending the subject matter that year ,--or are there in fact certain achievable model criteria for comprehension with testing for it ,and with that basic achievable comprehension the ability to develop beyond and grow.
Are they evan allowed into school without basic comprensive skills.-{the OSU football team aside}
In attempting to rate boats only by sailors abilities in a particular cat class at points in time over a year only reflects those sailors ability in that class which varies greatly compared to actual design model or theoretic model speed which many top sailor closely achieve, these model predictions and comp. annalysis with comparative model predictions and modification preformance design values are an important tool and another method for designers and boat builders to advance the state of the art in producing better design .SEE C Class design annalysis for example . Also concerning sailing skill and ability ,-a system that rewards comparative lack of skill by boat name classification as p rating does,--though having very similar design model features to supposedly faster boats is no excuse for mediocrity and is in fact self defeating in development.
Being incognisant of the development of multihull classes and the true measurement of comparative sailing skill is self defeating. Beach cats in this predominently design oriented high speed catamaran segment of sailing with its historic purpose for developing catamarans originally as high speed sailing craft ARE THE MOTIVE ,REASON AND PURPOSE OF ITS EXISTANCE AND THE MAIN REASON WHY IT BECAME SO POPULAR .
Denial of this leads to self defeat and decline . .-P rating applied to anything except a small diverse group of cats for a Wed night type club fun race is self defeating . It only rewards mediocrity of sailing ability and poor design with added time allowances which accomplishes what? --better design? -any comprehension of design or design values, of real comparative sailing skills ? ----no .

Many catsailors have no interest in P rating or racing under it ,Most appreciate the time effort and dedication to maintain it but we really need a better system model and basis for development , Suggest using base rating used in design measurement and modifying those slightly over a longer period of time using a time on time factor ,-which I think is what you stated most mono classes are going to -a design model basis rating with time av mod.to achieve rating numbers .

It is unfortunate that most good cat design and innovation currently is from overseas WITH THEIR DEVELOPMENT CLASSES and priority on design and design measurement rating systems , WITH SOME NOTED EXCEPTIONS ,-and the proportional number of REALLY GOOD ENTHUSIASTIC cat sailors overseas far exceeds that here in the US ,-why?


all the best Mark -
good on ya ,mate -
Carl

Hi Wouter

Yes.. You are correct that it's closer to Texel. The equation is secret however it still has a human component to assure fairness.

Carl... no matter how you get a number... if it's accurate... its fair. Any beef you might have can only be with the final result. Once again... what number is unfair...

In the end... the big boats are facing the same problem as beach cats... lots of designs... How do you go racing.

I can't say the the Chesapaeke Bay has seen any interest in the F18's yet though!

Chris
If you need a crew 1 day give me a call 409-697-1576.
I would love to check out the new Tiger.

Doug Ramsey

Well...get ready! The F18 Nationals are going to be on Chesapeake Bay (Hampton, VA) August 8th of 2005. (there are a few around that area).

Marc Reiter + I may be making a run over to Sabine lake from Bolivar Island some time soon - a reverse version of Mike Coles voyage - so you could get a chance to sail the Tiger on your home turf...

Just let me know when! I will greet you at the beach with
a cold one. You planning to sail all the way into sabine
lake? Kinda hard this time of year with a north wind.

my email address in pirate_tx@hotmail.com
home phone # 409-697-1576

Doug & Stacy Ramsey

There are numerous examples of unfair rating numbers in any rating, that's why it is called a rating game.
The T for example would have a much higher rated or faster number if the Olympic sailors raced them in events on a regular basis -
They are lighter -have more beam ,-better refined sails developed for the Olypics etc etc ,-yet are rated how comparatively to heavier boats with less beam and similar S A ?

ANY rating system contains generalities and is seriously flawed in numerous regards and should not be used beyond the local club racing level.
PLEASE REREAD the ISAF rating statement which STATES THIS CLEARLY and reinforces this commonly accepted fact.

In larger context the real point is that the flaws of this P rating system BASED ON SKIPPERS ABILITY IN A BRAND NAME CLASS does not promote the skill of sailors or the development of better design ,and instead reinforces brand classes or drives sailors to ONLY race a particular brand name or attend brand name only events ,- this ratings game flaw leads to the decline that we see in the sport as this rating system is used or applied to larger events .

We do have emerging models in each length category in general formula classifications which can similarly be used ,just as the big boat example you provided as base models in rating .
The one correct aspect of P rating is its direct equation of time to distance traveled , this real comparative numeric scale and basis should be used for all rating systems ,-Texel and ISAF should be changed to this scale for comparative -real time to distance referencing and annalysis .
The adaptation of ISAF -Texel type base rating numbers on the direct time to distance scale in P rating along with one wind speed is a superior means of rating that would corespond and promote the development and skill level and sport as we see occuring on the ISAF and Texel models ,-leading to the development of general length beam weight sail area categories for all to race within ,with much more individual freedom to modify and improve boats, not being stuck with a brand name class mfg rules and limitations to brand only modifications and add on parts gear sails and hardward . This seems a much better more systematic comprehensive approach to promote the sport, along with promoting skill levels and numbers of sailors interested .

O D is the ideal form of racing and is what historically makes the sport popular ,-the next best is formula categories that include a much broader range of builders in similar or specific OD classes together.
Complementing that is a rating system that recognizes the flaws inherant in rating schemes and the reality that the vast majority of people prefer racing in a class , that in turn helps the sport grow .

The cause and effect long term of such rating games are detrimental to the true intent of sport.-
Most instictively comprehend this and gravitate to class racing in some form or way,-be it on the course with other similar L B W SA boats,-or when ever available and just ignore the rating game .
all the best -
Carl

Some people posted that as long as you race comparable boats
the portsmouth yardstick is fair. How can a stock hobie 18 have a rating of 71.4 and a Hobie 18sx with a spin. rate 70.7???

Doug Ramsey

Hi Doug -
Agree -the basis of rating is flawed, in P by simply not having reliable sufficient qualified -verified information,-
{{skippers ability = times registered despite skill level in brand name class}}-among other numerous problems inherant in any rating system dealing in generalities ,-and not having a detailed comprehensive system of comparative annalysis.
We do have the ISAF rating system and Texel to compare base rating numbers with,-it would seem we need a combination rating system ,-the ideal one using the numeric scale of real time to distance traveled as P uses in theory, with the design measurement aspects of ISAF -tEXEL rating to establish base rating numbers ,-along with an added windspeed mod rating category to add the factors of beam -board -S A ,and foil effects at higher speeds.

In this so-called information age of instant global communication it seems we are just beginning to comprehend how to use it effectively by combining knowledge of existing systems and expanding and improving based on this knowledge --

Read a good -brief article on this broader subject -
by {the Derb } on NRO --here is a copy for any interested
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November 22, 2004, 8:23 a.m.
The Swelling Wave
A great wave of knowledge is soon to crash our shores.

An e-friend breezed by the other day — a person, I mean, whom I had previously known only through his website and some e-mail exchanges on topics of common interest. He didn't stay long. I was at home with my son. My wife and daughter were out (shopping, ballet practice). My son was in his room playing a computer game. The guest impressed Danny tremendously by greeting him with: "Word!" Then, leaving the boy to his game, we went downstairs and chatted over a drink. The guest showed me some interesting websites. My wife came home and was introduced. I took my guest out to dinner (or rather, he me — he paid, I mean). We came home and chatted some more, looked at some more websites. The guest left. I sat thinking for a while — thinking quite hard, as my thinking goes.


This guest was a young man, mid-20s I would guess, very energetic and fast-talking, very smart. He is a researcher at a famous university, in a field that is new: computational genomics. I'll talk about that in a minute. I can't give you his name, because he doesn't want it given. He keeps his identity well hidden, in fact. Even his website offers no clues, though there are usually ways to find out the ownership of a website. He: "I can't afford to be known. There are people out there trying to find out who I am — people who mean me no good, people who could wreck my career. I'm not going to let that happen."

Because I can't give the guy's name, I'll refer to him by a word that I thought I had coined in an NRODT review last year, but which in fact had been used as a company name well before that: "datanaut." (This person is not Charles Murray, who would be very flattered to be described as being in his mid-20s.)

"Datanaut" follows from my friend's specialty, computational genomics. Genomics is the study of genomes, those tremendously long strings of quite simple chemicals (there are just four of these chemicals, known familiarly as A, G, C, and T) found in the nuclei of living cells, which encode the inherited physical properties of whatever organism — a bacterium, a tree, a fish, a human being — the cells belong to. We now know what the actual patterns of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts are in the genomes of several kinds of living things, including human beings. This, unfortunately, is like knowing the sequence of brush strokes in all the Chinese characters that make up the Analects of Confucius: not really very informative unless you know what the characters — and their combinations and sequences — actually mean.

The human genome has about three billion "base pairs" of these fundamental chemicals. (An example of a base pair would be GT. The G lives on one side of the "double helix" you have heard about, the T on the other, connected by one of the bonds that hold the helix together.) Even a humble bacterium has about four million or so base pairs. That is a lot of data. To get any sense out of it, in fact, you need to engage in a newish discipline called "data mining." That is what my house guest, the datanaut, is involved in. He is a data miner, and the database he works with is the human genome.

Of course, it is slightly inaccurate to speak of "the" human genome. My genome is not identical to yours. If it were, we should be physically indistinguishable. The genome of human being A is slightly different from the genome of human being B. If A and B are siblings, chances are the differences are slight. If they are more distantly related, chances are the differences are larger, though not as large as if they were not related at all. Furthermore, if A and B both come from a population that has been breeding mostly among themselves for a few hundred years, while C comes from a different, remote population, it is very highly probable that you could discover this situation just by examining the three genomes. And now you know why the datanaut keeps his identity secret. He, or more precisely his website, has already been denounced as "bigoted" by one of those people who find their fulfillment in life by denouncing other people as "bigoted."

The science here is deep, and not to be trifled with. The datanaut uses some heavy-duty math in his work: stochastic processes, Lie algebras, control matrices, ODEs and PDEs. That, at least, I could follow without effort; though it is impressive to hear such terms bandied about by a researcher whose line of inquiry belongs, insofar as it belongs to any traditional scientific category, to biology. (The old-fashioned sort of biology — dissecting frogs, twiddling with microscopes — was referred to by the datanaut as "benchtop" or "wet" biology. This was not said disparagingly; indeed, he spoke affectionately of his own benchtop work, and seemed proud of his practical skills in this area. Like the rest of us, though, he now spends most of his working day staring at a monitor.)

Where he lost me was with the genetics. Phenotypes and haplotypes, polymorphous and heterozygous, alleles and demes, founder effect and bottleneck, lysosomes and sphingolipids... I'm not a total idiot about this stuff. I try to keep up with science, and know the meaning of all those terms; but I know them as you know the vocabulary of a language in which you are far from fluent, because you only need to use it once in a long while. When I hear those terms in the flow of speech, I have to translate. I have to stop and think: "What does that mean? Oh, yes...," by which time, of course, the speaker is four sentences ahead of me and I have lost the thread of his argument. If you are as incompetent in foreign languages as I am, you know the feeling.

I got the main drift, though. There is a huge swelling wave of knowledge building up — knowledge about human variation, human inheritance, human nature. Things have gone much further than I realized. Genes controlling intelligence? "We've got a few nailed down, and more are showing up..."

I spent much of my working life wading through masses of data. I never did disciplined "data mining" of the kind my guest engages in, but I know how patterns and significance gradually emerge out of a vast mass of undifferentiated bits and bytes. That's what is happening with genomics. It's not just happening from this one end, either. As in physics, where the cosmologist who deals with clusters of galaxies and the shape of the universe needs to understand the subatomic physics of quarks and leptons, so here too the very large meets the very small. As my friend is toiling away with his nucleic acid molecules, at the other end of the scale population geneticists such as Luigi Cavalli-Sforza are mapping disease frequencies and patterns of inheritance across entire nations and continents. The work of each reinforces the other.

And all this work has to be done while keeping a sort of radio silence, because it is deeply unpopular. I know some of the scientists doing this work — people like the datanaut. They are just like other scientists I have known, driven by a kind of hypertrophied curiosity, by an innocent urge to understand the inner secrets of the world. In other respects, they are just representative human beings, with the normal range of human weaknesses and failings. To the guardians of our public morality, though — the media and political elites, the legal and humanities academics — they are very devils, peering into what should be kept hidden, seeking out things better left alone, working to secret agendas, funded by groups of sinister anti-social plotters — "bigots!"

And the paradox is, that so much good will come out of all this research — is already coming out, in fact. As a result of work like the datanaut's, lives are already being saved — the lives, for example, of some of the tens of thousands of Americans who used to die each year because of adverse reactions to drugs. More marvels are just over the horizon. A couple might soon, for example, be able to pre-determine the attributes of their child before conception by picking the spermatozoon that is to initiate that conception. (Not all of a man's spermatazoa carry the same genetic information — if they did, my children would both be the same sex. To pick the best spermatozoon for the job, you would currently need to take several million of the little devils apart and scrutinize their cargo. However, non-destructive and highly efficient means of doing this are theoretically possible...)

"What about a cure for Alzheimer's?" I ask my guest. My Dad died from Alzheimer's, and it's a thing I worry about. I had read that some genetic research was going on.

The datanaut shook his head. "Tricky. Dangerous. Alzheimer's correlates with IQ, you see. Also has different incidence among different races..." He laughed. "Once researchers know that, they go find something else to work on. The state our science is in right now, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit. No need to go committing professional suicide."

So it goes. This wave of knowledge, this great wave, is building up in laboratories and research institutes all around the world. Sooner or later the wave will come roaring in to crash on our beach. When that happens, a lot of stuff will get swept away — a lot of social dogma, a lot of wishful thinking, a lot of ignorant punditry and self-righteous posturing, and probably some law and tradition and religion and social cohesion as well. There is, however, no stopping the wave. Or rather, we might stop it here in the USA, but then it would just go crashing ashore somewhere else — in China, or Japan, or India — somewhere with a different set of attitudes, a quite different kind of wishful thinking.

Dragged forward by cold science, which doesn't care what we think or wish for, we are headed into some interesting times.

Because those are not comparable boats - you said yourself that the SX has a spinnaker. However, the 18sx's portsmouth number is based on real data. This means that either the caliber of sailors on them is low or there is something very slow about the boat.

Carl...Good Lord! Where did the Human Genome topic come from?