Winter’s coming. Time for more sailing!

The autumn series will end on Sunday 10th November but that does not mean that the sailing stops at Aylesbury Sailing Club. Quite the contrary!

On 17th and 24th November we will be holding the Frost Bite and Cold Feet Series. There will be two races on each day, with the best three results to count towards the. trophies.

Then from 1st December we will start the Winter Series which is an official club series for the first time, running over the winter until the spring. There will be a first race at 10.30am and a second race soon afterwards, meaning that everyone can be home in time for a (warm) lunch.

For the winter series we will be trying a new dynamic handicapping system so that everyone who competes will end up with their own personal PY number (see here for an explanation of what PY numbers mean). It will will work like this:

• The first race anyone sails will be handicapped for that helm in the usual way using the standard PY numbers (i.e. 1102 for Standard Laser / ILCA7, 1142 for Solo and so on). The results for that race will be scored and look like normal, but the Sailwave software used for race results will calculate the effective PY which would have been required for each boat to have matched the winner on corrected time (this is called the Back Calculated Rating or BCR).

• The second race sailed in the series will use the BCR from the first race for handicapping the results of that race. This means that if all the same people sailed the second race in exactly the same time as they each did in the first race they will all tie for first on corrected time using the BCR. The results from that race will be produced together with a BCR for each boat resulting from that particular race.

• In the third race in the series, each competitor will be scored according to their average BCR from races 1 and 2.

• Fourth race, the average from the previous 3 races will be used and so on.

There will be two winners at the end of the whole series. One will be the overall winner on points scored over the whole series. The other winner (which is the more difficult to win in fact) will be for the person whose average BCR at the end of the series is the lowest percentage of the official PY for the boat they sail. It will not necessarily be the person who won the series on points who wins that award. It will also mean that in every single race every second will count in order to get a victory, and that may get even harder as the series goes on.