GBCA Discussion Forum

Here is what Scott just posted on the CLRA site.
"It's time again for our CLRA Winter Seminars to kick off. To start, these seminars are free of charge. Our presenters donate their time and are not paid through CLRA. All we ask is for you to bring yourself/crew/spouse/etc., be respectful and tip our bar tenders very heavily. These seminars are encouraged to be interactive. We are usually pretty relaxed in the format, but we will try to speed things along to not drag out the evening. We try to keep these seminars under two hours. With any of them, they could last for days. The seminars are scheduled as follows:

3/1/17: Seminar #1: Get'n Ready 2 Rumble – This will start the discussion of what needs to be done to get ready for a WNR, or any race; from boat prep to personal preparation.

3/8/17: Seminar #2: How to Recover from a bad start – When you have a bad start, the race is not over. There are many aspects to allow one to recover from a bad start. We have seen many times where someone was over early, but ended up winning the race. How did they do that?

3/15/17: Seminar #3: New Rules – How to Use Them – How do you apply the new rule changes? Did you know there were some changes?

3/22/17: Seminar #4: Courses & Tactics – Learn the changes being made on the courses and how to use tactics with these courses.

All seminars will be held at Villa Capri starting at 6:15pm."

Racing starts this week!!

As a result of requests at the Skipper's meeting, a change list for the SI's has been posted.

I am hoping to limit thread overpopulation by using this one for all CLRA business this year!
Racing starts in one week on April 1.  There is a great crop of "I want to crew" folks and several shifts of perspective among the entrants, so it should be a great year.  Skipper's meeting tonight.  Also for those who have not found it yet, more info on www.clearlakeracing.org. 
John

I'd be glad to share those bylaws.  I think you might get the idea that we were a bunch of paranoid lawyers from reading it.  But then . . . maybe we were.
Basically you make some decisions like some of the following, and write the rules to make it happen. 
Is it an exclusive thing or can anyone play?
Owner driven or rock-stars permitted
Limits:
PHRF band
SA/D limits
D/L limits
"At the time GBCA had a definition of "Sport boat" involving these two parameters)
Sprit/Assym boats allowed or Not
Deviations from stock?

Despite all our yelling about getting away from handicaps, in the end we decided to use them to help keep people's interest.  We did want to experiment with "better" handicap methods, but could not get ratings for a couple of the boats.  So in essence our group really just wanted to usurp the organizing authority's choice of rating bands.

Once upon a time...
Larry Kevan/Rand Valentin Electron
Larry Blankenhagen Parrot Tales
etc

I have the bylaws electronically from the latter period.  They run a bit long. 
The class failed in this area because every one of those boats, except mine, was set up as a cheater boat.  That is, they were all rule beaters.  Though we used PHRF as the basis for entry, almost every boat  had some sort of edge under some conditions. As a result, certain people were really great sailors on certain days. 

In my opinion, and I was in it from the shootout days until it died,  the best way to go about it is do handicap adjustment, starting with PHRF numbers and a  program like sailwave that does back calculated ratings.  After each race you allow the boats that did not win to adjust their handicap by a percentage of the difference in their bcr.  You have to have limits to deter sandbagging, but I think it could work.  Only other option is IMS/ORC and that takes a lot of effort to do right. 

Gulf Coast Complete is convenient if they happen to have the part you need.  I would contact Yanmar USA and go up the food chain for anything more complicated.  Highest recommendations for William Henslee.

bump

thought jfest was later in the year, hmmm. 

Quote from: Big John on September 11, 2014, 06:21:20 PM
Tom Meeh, Lauren Berger, and Glenn Ring raced this week.  Lauren and Tom are in the finals by the barest of margins.  Stuart Lindow was a no-show.  Next week, Jesse Fulmer, Jenny Hawkes, Carl Bohannon, and Ben Miller will face off to provide the last two finals positions.  For those scratching your heads, we have confirmed that the FJ racers were prevented from sailing on two of the three nights they no-showed because the chartered boats were not available for racing.  This re-instates Jenny in place of the Ruder boat team.  Next year's SI will be more explicit on this issue.

A valid source has indicated that Stuart's no-show was in protest about the handling of the FJ eligibility issues.  I take full credit for the ineptness in rule 17 of your SI's. The rule did not properly account for potential situations which did occur.  The PRO (Scott) was forced to make several arbitrary decisions, and did so in the fairest way possible under the circumstances. 

This is sailboat racing and we do it for fun. 
John

Sorry I haven't been watching this very closely.  Tough when you have database guts dripping from your ears.  The site was done in Joomla 1.5,  which was then advertising itself as a stable release.  It worked well enough and I was figuring how to do stuff. Things were rocky but usable until they stopped support for 1.5.  We knew we were being targeted by hackers, but most were inept and unable to overcome the captcha login on the administrator side.  Scott and I had decided to upgrade after this season, even if it meant kidnapping Buddy some dark and stormy night.  The hackers were ahead of us and figured out that our "contact us" would get them far enough inside to use the site for spamming others.  Hence our present state.  All I can say for sure is that once working, you will like the new one better than the old one.  But that is a week or so away. 
Meanwhile
Scott announces a lot of things on facebook.  The Semi finals started Wed the 10th Because we are a little earlier in the year (more daylight), races start around 4, with Skippers  meeting about 3.  Boats are C22's because of prep issues(thanks to Ben Miller for putting together the four boats on short notice).  Tom Meeh, Lauren Berger, and Glenn Ring raced this week.  Lauren and Tom are in the finals by the barest of margins.  Stuart Lindow was a no-show.  Next week, Jesse Fulmer, Jenny Hawkes, Carl Bohannon, and Ben Miller will face off to provide the last two finals positions.  For those scratching your heads, we have confirmed that the FJ racers were prevented from sailing on two of the three nights they no-showed because the chartered boats were not available for racing.  This re-instates Jenny in place of the Ruder boat team.  Next year's SI will be more explicit on this issue.
And
Please address correspondence such as Gary mentioned, eg "best liar" etc to the email addresses at the bottom of the season 6 results in this thread.  Please copy both c_l_r_a and me so I can keep bugging Scott.  More later.  Hmmm wonder if I can ftp this gizmo...

Yes Bee, the site is DOWN.  Unlike most of the previous failures, It is not down because of anything easily fixable. The web host took it down because it was hacked.  They are insisting we upgrade our software (untouched since Buddy built it) to a more secure current version before they let it reopen.  I have spent far too much time already trying to deal with obsolete software.  Little annoyances like having to upgrade the software before I can use the tool to upgrade it. 
This situation is pressing hard on the fundamental law of software.  "Software is something that if you fiddle with it long enough, you can make it do something.  This is opposed to hardware, which if you fool with it enough, breaks."
Thanks for posting the error message.
I will continue to joust with this windmill for a while longer.  There are brute force and awkwardness solutions that I may be forced to.
John

Again because of some limit  Results for series 6 split into handicap and one design with race results separate from series results, all pdf's.
John

Results for series 6 split into handicap and one design with race results separate from series results, all pdf's.
John

The Wed Nite web site is down so to appease the madding crowd, here are some results.
I have to rework the s6 results.  back shortly
John