overdraft

Hmm... What boats did I own that I wish would come back... maybe modernized a bit... Hotfoot 20! Oh wait, they did and it didn’t sell... Pocket Rocket 22! Oh wait, they did and it didn’t sell... +1 on Line 7 wouldn't mind a memosail either just for kicks

eye to hang it from... holiday season just finished... it's a christmas star!

Ya, it was pretty, but for the love of whatever why won’t the movie industry fact check with sailors when they do sailboat films... channel cutter getting knocked down? Maybe... the mast breaking as a result? Highly unlikely, but at a stretch, possible... The highly ballasted hull, now relieved of the pressure on the sails and the burden of the rig failing to right itself and instead mysteriously, what... somehow taking on water through the narrow companionway at sufficient quantity and speed to sink her? I mean they went to the trouble to get a bunch of other stuff right that’s often botched... Anyway, a sweet little story but...

oh ya, that's exactly what I'm talking about... someone sees that form and says nope, right off the bat. sure if you're a new guy all stoked about racing filling out all those forms and getting your crew down to unfold all your sails and measure them it's all good regardless of whether it's an ORC or PHRF form... the problem is when most of your fleet is repeat customers who have zero interest in doing all that again... those are the guys who you could maybe get to jump on the bandwagon if they saw that oh ya, I have a Cal Something and it's right there on the list... i support this new rating initiative!

For sure this is part of why any change is hard, but there seems to be an appetite for a more objective system. It looks like you could vastly reduce barriers to change by just plugging in a bunch of numbers and displaying vastly more OD ratings on that page of the website. If a significant number of boats can make the move simply by changing the address that they send their check (cheque, Czech, whatever) to, then you've got a lot less to overcome than if 100% of the fleet is starting from scratch.

Club racers everywhere seem to hate PHRF but continue to sail under it due to a lack of practical alternatives... ORC appears to offer an objective alternative, but every time there is a local movement to make it happen the hassle-threshold seems too high and only 4 boats actually get certificates and it fizzles out.... So surely there's enough information on EVERY new boat from the designer/manufacturer and MOST existing production boats to plug into the ORC VPP and create an "OD Rating". So imagine this at the club... grumble grumble PHRF grumble grumble and then someone goes to the ORC website and discovers that three quarters of the boats in the club are on the OD list... now you're only trying to convince the few, not the many, that they need to go to the extra work of getting a certificate. ORC gets a million new dollars to cover off the cost incurred to add in the OD data for existing production boats and becomes the new go to rating system for mixed fleets.... Is that boat beside you really in OD config? Protest them! Or just accept that for club racing we're better off with a guy flying a 155% instead of a 150% and no adjustment of a REAL rating than a very precise 3 second penalty applied on top of a BOGUS rating... If I was in business as a sailboat rating company I'd sure try something like this and see if my plan for world domination would work... what about you guys?

Selden has 'em... i bet their expensive though... http://www.seldenmast.com/en/products/pdfview/__file_595-950-E-46-47.pdf.html

If you're prepared to bend those Ronstan fittings and attempt to keep the alignment then you might as well bend your new eyes in the same fashion as the boat was rigged originally... I TOTALLY get that it looks ghetto (or ratchet or whatever we're saying these days) but there have been a ton of boats rigged that way over the years and I believe as sketchy as it looks that it's a sound method. Not to say it couldn't be improved... change to t-balls is the obvious choice... but this may be a situation where it's tempting to overthink it.

hey, it's a 16ksb (on a good day!)

Definitely thought about this. The floating tack system when drawn tight consumes about an inch and that's what lifts the foot off the deck. The difficulty is that I'm already at the front of my tracks and whereas floating the tack an inch moves me back onto the useful part of the track a jib cunningham will move the jib car position forward, possibly beyond where I can move the car. obviously when I get my next jib I can correct this, but in the meantime...

ya, long story... the boat has a hanked jib and the sail needs more tension than you can get by hand so you've got to put it on the winch every lap which is time consuming. In order to speed up the leeward marks I've put a tackle on the tack so now I just hand hoist to the mark on the halyard and then pull the tack down with the tackle to get my target tension. It's making the bottom corners way smoother and allowing us to keep the kite flying for a few extra boatlengths so it feels like a good move, but not if I'm losing 10 boatlengths on the beats.

So if I raise the tack of my jib and it's no longer touching the deck, but instead has a 1" gap, how much speed and/ or point am I losing now that I've lost the 'end plate effect'? Are we talking I'm going to look over the stern to see if I've picked up kelp, or more like in a side by side test over a mile course I'll lose 5 boatlengths? 24' frac rig 100% jib... Thanks for your thoughts!

thanks for the info mr. crocodile! I see you’re in Australia... haven’t seen anything like what you’re describing in North America... local clubs running golf handicaps, yes, but nothing formal. what sort of fleet size would you think it woild take for either of those systems to be viable?

i’m keen to hear more about this adjustable rating concept... PHRF takes ages to get a rating change in this neck of the woods anyway, certainly not a time frame within the context of a single series, and all the would-be rival systems pride themselves in being measurement based... maybe it’s some high level pro thing in which case ya, scrap the discards AND the dynamic rating system. if you’re at the club level I agree with sunseeker that it’s an attendance contest. I came in second one season in SV Cup... i was a mid pack rider at best... some would say grid filler... but I was one of the few guys that were prepaerd to race a motorcycle in the rain so I just got more points than many of the faster riders. So I guess it just depends what your objective is... figure out the best program? who are the the guys with the least life ouside sailing? encourage participation?

yup, I do. and i also have a thought and an opinion.