Snow Row results/traditional boat handicapping

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Did this year's Snow Row yeild any information that would be helpful in handicapping/grouping of tradtional boats? I missed the race due to a 14 year old traile

-- bad (bdonahue@capecodvoice.com), April 04, 2001

Answers

Barry, The bad news is that nothing changed. Boats in the same groups differed wildly. My boat is 18' loa, 5' beam, 260 pounds. Traditional in appearance, and built of wood ( livery double). The boat that beat us for first was also wood, a double ender narrow, and low freeboard. It's a beautiful boat, but it is probably about 1/2 the volume and weight of my boat. Same thing in work boat classes. Very light stretched Glouster Gulls going against much bigger and heavier boats . I think that the only good thing is that everyone knows that the groups don't mean too much, and that you can't put too much importance on class finish. I look around and look to see who I really should compete against, then figure out how I did compared to them. I'm still hoping to se some changes in the way we set up classes. Jeff

-- Jeffrey Roderick (nordvindcrew@yahoo.com), April 09, 2001.

Barry and Jeff, This has been an issue for as long as people have been racing and a topic anytime two or more racers get together. My solution was to keep building faster boats which I realize is not a solution available to everyone and one which I have not pursued without an occasional feeling of guilt. I propose a very simple system of handicapping, to be set up and plugged into the results of this seasons races as an experiment. This would not effect the official results of any race; it would just be something to fool around with. The handicap would be based on three characteristics: boat weight, waterline length and beam(could be waterline beam or beam at gunnell (sp?)) The fastest two or three boats on the circuit would be the baseline and receive no handicap (we can dig some data out of the more recent Oarmasters). Other boats would be compared to this base and receive seconds/race-mile based on extra weight, extra beam and reduced waterline length. Waterline length over the base would result in loss of some of the handicap. Owners would be responsible for providing the data on their boats, at least for this year. The exact formula would have to be a educated guess, with the emphasis on guess but it could be fine tuned as the season progressed. For any given race the handicap would be subtracted from the official time to yield the "unofficial handicapped results". I am throwing this out just to get a discussion going, There may be better ideas out there and better ways to do this. Sailboats have been doing this forever so it must be feasible. I would hope that someone like Andre, with more engineering and design experience, would get interested and throw some ideas into the mix. Whaddya

-- Jon Aborn (JonEAborn@aol.com), April 17, 2001.

Jon, I've been fooling around with a formula similar to yours. It adds weight and averages length and beam to come up with a number that could class boats. All we've (rowers) got to do is get a race to go with any new system. I'm all for it, how about any one else? Jeff

-- Jeff Roderick (nordvindcrew@yahoo.com), April 19, 2001.

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