One design racing can be tough on the ego. It’s not like you can blame the handicapping system - so hats off the Cape 31 organisers for keeping the whole fleet happy...
A year or so ago I wrote about the up and up of the Cape 31 class and how it was taking the Solent racing scene by storm. A year later, and things are still looking good for this exciting 31ft sportsboat. It’s not just that it’s a great boat to sail, but the class managers Dave Swete and Dave Bartholomew made it their mission to look after the back end of the fleet. “Look after the bottom half of the fleet, and the front will look after itself,” is the old cliché that it’s sometimes too easy to forget.
It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about dinghies in the UK or superyachts in the Caribbean, the same rule applies. Peter Craig is the event director and race chairman of the St Barths Bucket, the most successful regatta in the superyacht racing calendar, and he says the aim of the game for the captain and crew is to provide ‘owner entertainment’.
Now, if you’re working for an owner for whom winning is the only way to have fun, then you have a hard task on your hands. But as Peter points out, the more achievable aim is to race the boat as close to its potential as possible, and if you’re rewarded with a race win or a good score, all the better. Better not to hang your hat on the result, though, or else you leave the fun factor to the mercy of the scoreboard.
It reminds me of a piece of advice Ian Walker (the double Olympic medallist and Volvo Ocean Race winner) once gave me when I was pushing to make the next improvement to the handicap numbers in the Seldén Sailjuice Winter Series, the winter handicap racing championship I’ve been running every winter since 2009. When the series started out we were reliant on the PY numbers being provided by the RYA which back then were woefully out of step with reality. Merlin Rockets, and Phantom singlehanders were wiping the floor with a bandit handicap that clearly needed updating while other boats like the Laser never got a look-in on the top 10 of any event. Sailors weren’t entering events because they knew that with a bad handicap they were on a hiding to nothing. It wasn’t good for participation.
Over the following seasons Andrew Craig from Queen Mary Sailing Club and his Great Lakes handicap committee reworked the numbers so effectively that sometimes we saw 15 different types of boat filling the top 15 places. Participation increased as sailors began to realise they could win in pretty much any boat, so long as they sailed it well.
However, whi
