After another interesting Ledge to Lancelin it is becoming obvious that the racing divisions are unfair!

I reckon it should be weight based (like horse racing), and have nothing to do with age, sex or experience.

The point being if you weigh more than 85 kilos (Like me) you have no chance in winds under 20 knots and if you're over 95 kilos save your money.

The current race divisions mean the stout people are subsidising the whippets.

Let the shouting begin

So what about when it's windy and the lightweights struggle. The winner Jesper is around 85kg. Maybe there could be an additional section within each division for heavy people with inappropriate gear. All said weight divisions could work but is a little hard with arguements about the cutoff limit, an extra 7 groups of prises needed and a set of scales on the beach for registration and do you weigh people wet or dry and how much clothing etc.

For those of us who havent seen a race report -

I saw that there were a lot of dnf's, and that the fleet was very spread out.
How windy was it? Did the winners use slalom gear or formula?

JB

Because it's more fun having a race that's not dependent on the luck of the weather. Racing isn't about beating people, it's about having them around so you can see how well you sailed. If you are 95kg and you're racing a comparable 60kg sailor in marginal planing conditions, you'll never know how well you sailed. All you'll know is that it wasn't your conditions.

You could say the 95kg guy should just have a bigger sail, but there are practical limits to sail size, and it won't help the sport if everyone who wants to be competitive has to have a full range of expensive kit.

Boat sailing has lots of classes, and when you look at a major annual survey of sport in Australia (the Sweeney report) you see that boat sailing is incredibly successful at turning sailors into racers; much more so than comparable sports like skiiing or car racing.

Weight classes are great. I race Wallies as well as other gear, and I find the Wally competition is very, very fair, because we have three weight divisions so everyone is racing someone pretty close to them in potential performance.

Yep, I think divisions for kit are good as well. I raced world champs in Slalom a long time ago, and raced slalom again just a couple of weeks ago, but I no longer want to spend the $$$$ to be competitive for just a few races a year. It shouldn't be too hard to make up some rules to ensure that guys without Formula or modern slalom gear have their own division/s.

Sure, there's hassles creating the extra prizes (I know that very well, I've organised many Wally trophies) and there's some dilution, but I bet there's a good chance you'd get more than enough extra entries to make it worthwhile.

Looking at boats (because information is available) around the world shows that the idea "we have too many classes" may be wrong; popular, logical, but wrong. The countries that have more classes have more boats, because people can find something they like to sail, and something that fits their budget. So maybe we get too worried about diluting events by having divisions.

So they didn't have slalom and formula racing?

Using weight is a cop out to an extent, stick Dunkie or Maynard in the fleet and they'd finish top 5 not be whinging about their 100kg+ frames.

If they did have a slalom class that is just the breaks of racing, most buy gear for the conditions- you cant race em all and you cant win them all. If conditions fall outside you're ability or gears suitability there is nothing you can do, and complaining is pointless.

And before anyone attacks me I am 95kg, I do race and I have lost races more than once due to lulls when I was at the head of fleet. However I dont blame the conditions, not even the gear I was on- I blame my lack of motorvation to get fitter.

Irrespective anyway of classes if you had an newish 80 wide and 9.8m sail you would be faster across the wind than any formula board in anything over 8knots.

The whole weight thing is a little irrelevant - in fact Finian has already won the ledge to Lancelin in only around 12 - 15 knots!

That was about 4 years ago. He's 120 kg ish!

Thats assuming you have an infinite amount of gear to choose from though..