IOM Scratch Summer Series Round 1

​A wonderful day greeted the 14 sailors who came along for the first scratch round of the year. The hardest decision on the day was choosing the A or B rig, given the wind wanted to mess with both throughout. In the end, we had just two intrepid sailors with enough intestinal fortitude to use the A during the day (both taking out wins when the wind didn’t get too much for them), the rest remained on B. Stu Dawes came along to pro for the day (thanks Stu), however, after a few races, Les Hanson passed his controller on to Stu and Les Pro’d for the rest of the day. Thanks for your help today guys.
 
The buoys were checked  and re-set where needed, giving us multiple start lines now, as well as the ability to start into both the northerlies (such as today) and to cater for the afternoon southerlies, should they turn up – all in aid of less time on course preparation. Still room to improve, but we are getting very close to a real good placement of marks for any condition.
 
Unfortunately, we had a few breakdowns today, which took a fair number of skippers out, but they will be back for round two, with the reliability issues all sorted. The racing itself was amongst the best I have seem in a very long time. Not only was it quite close in the results – more so than the final tally shows, but you could often have 4-6 yachts finishing within seconds of each other.
 
It was also fantastic to see the on-course communication improved so much, advising others of what you were doing etc. Also, the amount of penalties taken without any prompting at all has to be mentioned. Great to see someone apologise for an error and quickly doing their penalty turn, and for the ones called for buoy contact, all of them (as far as I saw) were done without question and straight away. Exactly what the club needs to promote – so a great job by everyone today.
 
We had our two new members on the water today, Paul and Justin Rogers, both sailing Cockatoos. Both had some issues on the water, but given time, will start to finish many more races and become competitive in time. Give it time and patience guys, and the rewards will come.
 
There was a slight issue with the Rib being used in the middle of the bay today, but on request, it came back nice and quick to perform recoveries. This was discussed after the sail day in the bar, and in the future, if the Rib is being used, we will have communication to the MBYC control box, either by phone or radio, and can then request recovery through that method, which should pose no issue at all.
 
It was decided in our last committee meeting to experiment with a handicap system on the day, to help encourage newer sailors. They can scratch race with the experienced ones, yet have something to feel real good about at the end of it with an improvement seen in their handicap result. On that, the method used for this (and it is seen to be flexible to try to reward and encourage the right skippers) is that the skippers on the day have their last 5 results collated and averaged. A skipper will need a minimum of three past results to enable a handicap, which will be averaged as well and moved to the 5 result average when they get 5 results. This averaged result is compared against the other skippers on the day to gain their ranking amongst skippers. Consider this ranking similar to a golf handicap. Then, the days results is compared against the 5 result average to get a net score, and the highest net score wins the handicap on the day.
Example;
Jason has past 5 results of 6, 4, 5, 2, 11
This gives him an averaged result of 5.6
This is compared against all the other skippers on the day, giving him a ranking of 8 out of the 14 skippers present on the day
He finishes in 4th place on the day
His handicapped score is then 4
This handicapped score is compared against all the other skippers, with the highest score being the handicap winner
 
I’ll post the handicap results after the scratch ones.
 
Today, Ray Joyce blasted out of the blocks, and was hardly headed, a deserved winner of round 1 on 14 points. Rod Jackman had a welcome return to form, maintaining some excellent consistency (and seemingly knowing exactly how many drops he could have) coming in second on 18 points. Mike Hickman was also very consistent, coming in third on 22 points.

​Now, to handicap scores for the day. We had three skippers with not enough results to get a handicap position – however, they will soon. The handicap results are as follows;

​Handicap winners on the day were myself on 4 points differential, followed by Rod Jackman on 3 points, followed by Lisa Blackwood on 2 points.
 
Upcoming Sailing
Wednesday, 8th January is DF95 handicap at the dam, starting at 10am for an hours scratch racing, and then on to the handicap.
Sunday, 12th January is RM Scratch Series Round 1 at MBYC