Hi Mark, not sure if it's of interest, but at our club we have an SI that says that any class that has an average of 5 boats out per race in the previous year (we hand-wave that calculation rather than actually compute it) in the cat handicap fleet - ISAF
www.schrs.com - can have their own start and seperately scored results. The Dart18s were the last fleet to achieve this, but without exception, everybody in the Dart fleet decided that they'd still like to see their results against the other boats and so we just score their results seperately (+ additional glassware) as well as include them in the handicap results, and they start with the handicap fleet. The F18s will achieve this 'status' next year and I suspect the same thing will happen. In this way the club's policy adapts to whatever folk decide to sail. Racing spinny boats against non-spinny boats sounds like madness, but at the end of the day we're (that's our club, not all clubs in general) out there to have a good time in club racing; most of us treat it as practice for 'real' events so big starts are good and winning is secondary. The bar banter is always good after the race too; especially when a Dart18 is the first to reach the windward mark after a decent start in a force 6... Our policy is similar for regattas; invite everybody; see who turns up; take times for everybody (it's not that much extra work**) and score overall and seperate class/rating-splits as appropriate with additional prizes for the separately scored divisions. If we had say 10-20 of one class turn up we would probably just ask them if they wanted a separate start... We would not get away with forcing any particular formula or class and I don't think we'd like to do it anyway; let folk sail whatever they like and try and accommodate everybody as necessary. Our cat fleet is growing steadily; but at the expense of the monhull fleet is has to be said...
www.mumblesyachtclub.co.uk**By using something like Prolog -
www.software4clubs.com - you press a button every time somebody cross the line and enter their sail number - the data ends up as a text file on the PC which can then be sucked into the scoring software. Presumably if two boats finish very close together you press the button twice and fill in the sailno later, so you still only need to record sail nos manually... The Round Isle of Wight race was done like this recently -
www.fastscatrace.com.
See also:-
www.precisiontiming.com/3frame_alge.htmwww.autohoot.com/AutoHoot.htm www.soton.ac.uk/~jets/raceday
