IRC
The Italian Cookson 50 Cippa Lippa blasts her way downwind towards the finish of an extremely breezy 2014 Rolex Middle Sea Race which saw a punishing retirement rate with no fewer than 71 of the 122 race starters failing to complete the course. Overall victory was taken by Lee Satariano’s locally owned J/122 Artie
Crazy horses…
Some 30 years ago CHS was about to look back on its first year, and I suspect those at the newly positioned RORC Rating Office in Lymington were wondering what it was that they had started! There is a rumour that the idea of CHS was teased out over a drink or three at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris between Jean- Louis Fabry and Alan Green, the bar’s name then becoming the origins of the name that we all thought stood for Channel Handicap System. I haven’t delved any deeper into this to find out whether it is true as I don’t want to dispel the myth.
In 1985, the first full year of CHS, the new technical manager John Moon, with a huge amount of help from Ken Kershaw from the Royal Yachting Association (RYA), developed the original MS-DOS program that was used to input the data, create a database and produce certificates. I am sure that a huge amount of time was spent scratching heads and wishing they hadn’t agreed to this new project. It is a testament to both John and Ken that this software remained at the heart of the CHS and IRC program for the next 20 years. Tony Ashmead and Jenny Howells also joined the office in 1985 and I understand from Jen that while the bugs gradually got ironed out, the user interface of the software remained largely the same right up until 2005.
At that point we replaced it with a new system which finally joined RORC’s database with the UNCL’s, and meant that duplicate software was no longer needed – the consequence is that every- thing now sits on the same server and can be accessed by rating office staff anywhere that they can get an internet connection. By 1990, just six years after the first CHS certificates were issued, over 4,500 boats held CHS certificates and the system was expanding far beyond the Solent, English Channel and Brittany area. This was also a time when we started to see designs being drawn specifically for CHS racing, rather than them being older IOR designs needing somewhere else to race.
In the late 1980s I was busying my teenage years sailing for the late Sir Peter Johnson on the Humphreys-designed One Tonner Highwaymanunder CHS. At the time I didn’t really care which rating rule we used. The only thing that mattered to me was that we sailed as well as we could and that the results reflected that. So not much has changed in that respect…
Little did I know then that the book I would have placed on my desk the first day I sat down at the rating office in 1998 would be Peter’s
22 SEAHORSE
own bible Yacht Rating – Speed, Success and Failure, with the wise words from Mike Urwin to ‘first, read that!’
As with many rules, the early years tend to be the golden years. Designers and sailing teams tend to be more focused on playing the rules rather than breaking them. Seeing how a nicely propor- tioned boat works in the rule tends to go ahead of trying to find what anomalies are over or under-compensated for. In the early 1990s both IMS and CHS were going through this stage and all was look- ing good with nice all-round designs like the Farr 44 Gauchoand a number of new CHS-friendly production boats being produced. As available computing power and modelling started to go through the roof in the coming years, Jean-Louis and Alan’s idea to main- tain confidentiality in the rating software came into its own. While designers could use far more powerful tools than those available to the rating offices to find the loopholes, they were unable to carry out such a study when the exact formulae in CHS remained unknown. Equally important was the ability of a rating rule to accept developments once considered unusual or radical into the fleet. For example, CHS quickly found a way to adopt bowsprits and asymmetric spinnakers when sailors moving from skiff dinghies to keelboats called for them. Initially this was done in a slightly penal way that would have written off the option in a fully published rule, but in CHS it allowed the development to filter in. The same could be said of water ballast, carbon masts, and after the name change to IRC the introduction of canting keels and most recently the Dynamic Stability System (DSS).
Since he joined the rating office in 1993 much of this drive forwards to adopt the new rather than shun it has come from Mike Urwin. Having a background in engineering, Mike’s approach has always been to find solutions rather than problems.
And the questions still cover a very wide range or areas; whether it be coping with the ever increasing size of sloops and ketches in the superyacht arena, finding a way of objectively defining a code zero, or establishing an accurate and repeatable way of measuring LP on a classic with a jib-top, a jib and a staysail all hoisted together, they all need answering so that boats can continue to compete under IRC into the future, and the sailors can hopefully continue to walk off the dock with the same views that I did nearly 30 years ago – we sailed well, we did well. James Dadd, chief measurer
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KURT ARRIGO/ROLEX
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