Thursday, August 7, 2008

Rating Frustrations


We got our PHRF-NE rating yesterday in prep for the Monhegan Race this weekend and little did we know Visions has been turned into a full on Race Machine (at least according to the raters). They gave us a Base -3, Cruising +9. I don't even know what that means as all our sails are Dacron and we don't have any spinnakers....which would we even use? I had been expecting somewhere around +50, meaning we are leaving about 1:30 at the dock this weekend unless I can get it amended in time. I did hear back from the rater this morning and it has been pushed up the line, so I do have hope. Why they didn't look at the ORR rating (which was listed as available on the Cert) I can't understand. Our main competition is a Class 40 Ahmas which has a PHRF rating somewhere between -10 and -3 and an ORR Time on Time rating of 1.064. Our ORR rating is 0.899 meaning that the Class 40 is about 18% faster than us, yet we potentially have the same rating....RIDICULOUS. This unfortunately is why people dislike PHRF and get turned off by its sometimes arbitrary ratings. It takes a really diligent committee to get ratings right the first time, but gosh, a blind squirrel would have realized this nut was rotten.

UPDATE -- apparently my complaints were founded. New PHRF-NE cert just arrived at 42/54 ... just about where I thought we should be. MUCH BETTER.

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