Results Secretary's Ramblings

Firstly, can I remind members about their duties as OD. The form is shown below.

Please can all members acting as OD's fill in the date, fleet, race no, and cross off handicap or pursuit. Can they also enter ALL members of the OD crew, including the poor unfortunates sat in a freezing rescue boat, while you're in a nice warm hut!
Please also try to fill in Helm and Crews name and the sail number, obviously I know most members and can easily identify them, but sometimes we get new or infrequent sailors who are not known to me and all the details will help.
For a pursuit race, all I need is the boats position in the fleet. For a handicap race the number of laps completed and their finishing time. It is helpful, but not necessary to record sailors time for each lap. Useful, because although the sailing committee decided not to allow OD's to declare last laps void when the wind dies, if we do get a race where the last lap is excessively slow, I will wherever possible publish unofficial results without the last lap. This is only possible if I have timings for all laps.
You may if you wish work out the results, but I will enter the times into Salwave and use that to calculate the results, since this will yield the BCE and BCR numbers I publish for each handicap race. More on those later. So calculating results is entirely optional for you.
Finally I should be at most races to collect the sheets, but if I'm not, there will be a stamped addressed envelope in the hut with the sheets, so please pop the sheets in the post.

With the change to OD scoring for next season, agreed at a recent sailing committee meeting, we may possibly see some retrospective adjustment to the results for earlier races. For short series, i.e. less than 8 races completed, no member will be eligible for 2 OD2's. This may come about because a series had more than 8 races planned, but in fact only 8 races take place. In which case a member who was awarded 2 OD2's during the series will have the second OD2 converted to a DNC or an average of their score for the series. Initially if a series is planned to contain more than 8 races then I will award the OD2's for the first two OD duties, and then at the end of the series if 8 or less races were completed, I will go back and readjust the second OD2 to be a DNC or an average of series score. The determinant between the two will be that is the OD2 converted to a DNC would count for the series then an average score will be awarded. If the OD2 converted to a DNC is discarded, then it will remain a DNC.
For short series with 8 or less races planned, I will try to keep the readjustment to a minimum, by allocating a DNC or average for the second OD duty at the time of entering the race score depending on whether the DNC would have been discarded at that point. There will still need to be some readjustment, since if a second OD2 early in the series was converted to a DNC and safely discarded, but subsequently other DNC's were recorded for the sailor and so the OD2 converted to a DNC would have counted, then it will need to be converted to an average score.

Back to BCE's and BCR's which I will continue to publish next season. Your BCE number for a given race is the amount of time by which you would have needed to reduce your time to tie with the winner, so take the result shown below.

Take our (Laser 2000 21225) time in 7th of 43:51 and the BCE of 7:33, if we had sailed 7 minutes and 33 seconds faster, i.e. competed the race in 36:18 then we would have tied for 1st place with Jeremy. Somewhat unlikely given our results I know!

When looking at the BCE number it's important to concentrate on the Elapsed time and not the Corrected time, otherwise things begin to look very strange. E.G. we had a BCE of 7:33, but Dave Brannigan in 8th only needed to sail 6:40 quicker to tie for first, yet we were only 4 seconds apart on Corrected time, how come Dave and Sandra in a much quicker boat would tie if they reduced their time by less than us? The answer is in the Elapsed times of 43:51 for us, and 38:24 for Dave and Sandra. We needed to complete in 36:18 to tie, and Dave and Sandra needed to complete in 31:44 to tie for first. So the RS400 needed to be significantly quicker because of it's 952 PY.

The BCR is a measure how well you sailed against your actual PY rating, Jeremy who won, received a BCR of 1038 exactly the same as his actual PY, everyone else a BCR higher than their actual rating, Keith and Mandy in 2nd, only 49 seconds away on BCE, received a BCR of 976.5, or 2.5% higher than their actual PY rating. Whereas, we in 7th got a BCR of 1315, or 20% higher than our actual PY rating. Thus Keith and Mandy were only 2% worse than Jeremy, while we were 20% worse. I will continue to publish BCE's and BCR's next season.

Your webmasters have been hard at work reorganising the web site in the winter, and I would urge you to take a look at the changes. We hope page placement is a little more logical now, with this new results section taking it's place at the top menu. Last year, Results rather took over the Sailing section, and we hope this arrangement will be easier to use. Don't forget the web site is a quick and easy to use resource for such things as OD duties, so you'll always know when you're due for a duty.

Back to BCR's, I have calculated everyone's average BCR for the regular series of last season. Then I calculated that against their actual PY rating to give a measure of their sailing quality for the season, all of course entirely unofficial and having no bearing whatsoever on the official results and championships. You can find the 2008 table here, and the 2009 table here. The 2009 table also includes a comparison against 2008, so you can see how you improved over the season.

One problem with calculating BCR over a season, is that it's a lot more difficult to win 50 races out of 50 than it is to win 1 race out of 1, so you will see that the top three in the 2009 table have only 5 races between them.

In general it easier for the conventional sailors to do better in this table than the asymmetrics, since generally there are many less entrants in the conventional races.