SSS Classes

[fauxboat]

Hello!

After Round the Rocks, a racer prompted me to look at classes and how they were done in the past, specifically the class sizes and starting orders.

That was a good question.

I had not realized how much variety the SSS has had, just in the last dozen or so years.

Looking at old sailing instructions, the SSS used to start high-handicap first. Then things changed to start high-handicap boats last, which I've continued.

And the SSS used to start singlehanders and doublehanders on the same line at the same time. My more immediate predecessors gave them separate starts, which I've also continued.

And then there's class sizes. Last year it seemed like we had many very small classes, in part because participation has dropped, and in part because we had a lot of classes. In the past, the median class was typically 9 boats.

If you like stats, here's the ECDF of the class sizes by year,

Round the Rocks:

Here I've added a black line to show the numbers from 2017-2019, inclusive, since I believe RtR was just getting started in the old, old days.

Corinthian:


For Corithian the race is older, so the black line is all races <= 2019.

Thank you, PSutchek, for getting me to take a deeper look.

 

[fauxboat]

Another question that came up was class breaks. (Just considering Round the Rocks here.)

Handicap racing is hard because the boats are dissimilar, and unless there's a very big turnout it is unlikely that every boat will end up in a good-sized class of similar boats. We do try, and so in the last 2-3 years, after pulling out the multihulls and Moore 24 and Express 27 classes, we've sliced up the pool of 80-90 remaining boats into
* singlehanded vs doublehanded
* spinnaker vs non-spinnaker
* sportboat vs non-sportboats

Non-spinnaker boats have always (?) been lumped into one class. That's tough because it means boats compete with a broad range of handicaps. On the other hand, it lets boats compete against more other boats, and fewer people go home thinking they were DFL in their class.

Within the spinnaker boats, subdivision on handicap range can make the classes pretty small. See above.

But it is interesting to look at the class breaks and how those have changed a bit. To keep things slightly simpler, just looking at the high end of the handicap range, in the "old days" of 2012-2013, the high-handicap spinnaker boats were in classes from 153 and up.

Starting 2014, doublehanded and singlehanded spinnaker boats had their class boundary move from 153 to 162.

In 2021 the doublehanded boundary moved again, down to 137, and there were two (???) classes labeled "Singlehanded Spinnaker" without a clear handicap distinction in the name, but likely a break at 162. Same thing in 2022. One of those classes had three boats, so a third of the class was DFL.

Interesting stuff, if you're into that.

Thank you for prompting a closer review of the past.

And thank you for racing with the SSS.