Re: [Cal_Boats] I need to talk to a racer..."Cruising Class"

In a message dated 9/23/2009 3:27:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time, fi… [at] yahoo.com writes: How do other clubs make the Cruisier Class Fair and competitive while not having a dominate boat winning all the time? Kevin - One thing we have done for a single, reverse phrf, pursuit race at the end of the year is use an average of each person's "rating needed to win" for the season. Sailwave is a free scoring software that you can download off the internet and one of the columns it creates when scoring is "BCE" (if I remember correctly). That column tells each racer what their rating would have needed to be to win the race ie: if a boat rated 126 won the race and a boat rated 162 came in second it would read 205 or whatever rating would be required for him to win the race. It helps people see how close they are to sailing to their rating and is quite humbling. Anyway at the end of the year we look at all these numbers throw out the high and the low and average the best seven races of all competitors (you want the same number of races for each competitor to average) and assign that rating for the race. It is a 15 mile race and people we're finishing within a few minutes of each other. This year we only had 3 boats for some reason and one ran aground but the 2 remaining boats finished 18 seconds apart so it works pretty well. It takes a season to get good data but it can be adjusted every year as people get better. Paul