Just to correct a couple of misconceptiions.
PY is not based on the average of all boats, but the average of all results that come above a threshold point. What this means in practice is that results where you finish at the back of the fleet after capsizing are unlikely to contribute to the calculation, nor are those for people still learning and at the back of the fleet. It also has the effect of tending to discount results from classes with binary performance on days when the weather doesn't suit them. Foil Moths in sub foiling conditions are an obvious example, and of course the Cherub is another. The end result is that PY represents about the top two thirds of most fleets when sailing in conditions that aren't too unsuitable for the class.
The Great Lakes and RYA handicaps are calculated in the same way. The differences are :
- firstly that the Great Lakes handicaps are calculated on a much smaller data set, but for clubs much closer in water type
- secondly that whereas the RYA won't publish a number for which there is insufficient data, the Great Lakes people will take as educated a guess as they can.
When the Great Lakes started out the RYA handicaps were still largely dominated by club estimates of handicaps, which they were supposed to use the threshold method to calculate, but it is believed that a good number of clubs didn't do the sums and just guessed or filled in "same as last year". This tended to make the RYA numbers rather slow to change. The Great Lakes, on the other hand, made calculations based only on race results. In recent years though, with on line returns system, the RYA system is just as quick to respond to changes as the Great Lakes. Indeed I've got something of a suspicion that some published numbers are tending to follow the weather, so if we get three windy years in a row handicaps for wind loving classes will tend to reduce and vice versa.
Have you considered dual scoring? We used to dual score the Nationals for a handicap prize. The other system that might be worth considering is the RYAs NHC system, which is a sort of personal handicap system which progressively adjusts for each boat. It may be though that there aren't enough people doing enough events for it to be useful.
The difficult bit when faced with multiple versions of handicap numbers, of course, is deciding which ones give the right answer. I've never been very clear on how you can be sure one number is right and the other wrong.
Any concerns with handicaps that I can help with don't hesitate to send me a message, I may not spot things on the forum. Important things to do, as I've said before, is to get your clubs to distinguish between 97 rules, 05 rules and foil boats and get those returns in. If the results are in the RYA database and correctly categorised I may be able to give you some pointers even if there aren't enough results for a published number. You might also want to consider getting every result for the season into a single spreadsheet or sailwave file and doing some analysis on that. Sailwave has some capability.
enjoy the season!
Jim C
