Wait minute I never said that. I said that a crew doing alot of open class racing instead of ONLY a smaller number of strict OD races will be better crews. As in any additional racing will make you a better sailor. Open class sailing is just as valuable in this as OD racing.

We shouldn't be putting any idea's in the heads of novices that open class (club races) are "Pfffww , whatever". Arguably the majority of weekend or wednesday evening club races are OPEN class races. By doing these (with a dependable rating system and I'm working on that ) these novice crews will gether sailing skill alot faster than by sailing OD with that other guy on the same boat once ever month or sailing in a 5 boat OD fleet once every two months.

THAT is what we are talking about here. That is the value of handicap racing.

Not to mention the situation where an isolationist group of a handful of boats get to a large handicapped fleet and get killed because they only trained on eachother and may be trained themselfs to only beat the one that was marginably better in their own group. Tactic are a great example of this. We all know that it heaps more easy to get a good start in a 5 boat start then it is in say a 30 boats start. I've seen it happen at my club. We always race with about 12 to 25 boats in our weekend club races (open class) then we had a OD nationals at our club; who do you think got the best starts ? Yes, the guys that had done tens of open class starts where the line had been crowded.

That my friend is the benefit of open class racing.

And to all who think I'm arguing that OC is better than OD. I'm NOT. I'm just aggitating against the believe that OC is so inferiour that it is practically, well, useless. Far from it. I'm arguing that both are equally valuable. I'm not arguing that H16's should abbandon their OD racing, far from it, I'm (only) arguing that H16 sailors should not isolated themselfs from OC racing.

Wouter