Date: 10/5/2006
Name: Jay Sawyer
email: NEsailor@charter.net
subject:
Portsmouth


I race Portsmouth a lot in Nebraska and have a little experience with it. The most important thing in Portsmouth is that the committee use the wind factors to vastly improve the accuracy. However I don't think that helps a SJ21 much since our rating gets faster as the wind builds, where phrf usually just used the same number, 252.

In Portsmouth there are modification factors and for racing non spinnaker you get to multiply the handicap # by 1.01 , 1.008, 1.01 for the DPN, Beaufort 0-1 and Beaufort 2-3 wind ranges. This is quite helpful as the rating of 94.8 changes to 95.748. If a boat were using a headsail less that a 110 only there is a modification for that too but I've never seen that used or accepted. Our jib is a 110 I believe so we don't qualify. Our rating specifies class genoa so we can't technically use the 155 in Portsmouth without getting an additional penalty but I've never seen that enforced. I was involved in some of this when our rating in the Portsmouth handbook was changed and more closely defined a few years ago. We used to have a slower Portsmouth rating. I just pulled out my old 1992 book (I never throw things away)and our rating then was DPN 96.3 and 97.1 96.8 95.1 for the windspeeds; as compared to today they are DPN 94.8 and 97.1 95 93.8. It's a long story how that changed.

There is a Table V that is a conversion between phrf and Portsmouth. The San Juan ratings for different wind speeds are: 94.8 = 238 in phrf 97.1 = 252 95 = 240 and 93.8 = 233 phrf So using the standard 252 in phrf seems like a kinder rating and Portmouth should be harder to win with since our rating gets lots faster as the wind builds.

All these can be found with some difficulty at US Sailing by clicking on Racing, Offshore, Handicaps and then Portsmouth then find Offshore boats P-Z.

What I've found is that the longer faster boats can win easily with any rating system especially if there are any waves. The handicap range needs to be grouped as narrow as possible. Also using a spinnaker is much better because the correction for non spinnaker is not at all enough to win.


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