Wanted: Mainsheet Trimmer!

Today Mother Nature and the Race Committee combined to offer us a 3.5 mile course 13-18 knots of wind on a sparkling warm day. We were short-handed. (I would have emailed Baydog return trip tickets, but it was the wrong season: this time of year he's hard-wired into the New York Giants!) Short of hands, we finished as the top boat in the 2nd half of the 14-boat fleet. But it was a fun sail and party afterwards. Thing of it was, being another stupid triangular course, I can't think of anything I might have learned today. The one accomplishment is that the spinnaker is finally dry from last weekend! There aren't any action photos, because we were shorthanded. (Did I mention we were short-handed?) These shots were taken during the post-race party.

I finally got around to this month's Latitude 38, in response to Mikey's query a couple of posts back. There's a great shot of about 8 or 9 Wyliecats racing DDW. That's the high point of this month's issue for me. But I did get a kick out of the article Lee Helm's about PHRF. The discussion at each mark of the time deltas between boats epitomizes PHRF racing for me. I remember that group number-crunching going on whenever I've been crewing on PHRF boats.

I repeat my mantra: 

• One-design racing is yacht racing in its purest form; everything else (all handicap formulas, algorithm, ratings, etc.) is equally fraudulent. 
• If all of us are to settle for racing what variant boats we end up owning, the least (or the best) we can do is to arrange for pursuit races.

Then the fraudulent ratings schedule the starts for each boat as opposed to scoring their finishes. That done, for the rest of the time on the water we can all concentrate on sail trim, course and boat handling, boat for boat, like we would in one design. No more holding hand calculators at mark roundings to gauge deltas.