IRC


The customers


I had lunch the other day with my good friend Johan Tuvstedt, an excellent sailor and measurer, while he was chairing the technical committee at the recent World Sailing Double Handed Offshore Championships in Cowes. Johan has a uniquely broad perspective on rating systems: he sits on both the IRC Congress and several ORC committees, and is also involved in a range of Scandinavian local rating and handicap systems. That gave us opportunity to look at the world of rating in a broader sense. Johan is not just a rules and measuring man either, his racing


record speaks for itself, with Jolene, his longtime sailing partner Fredrik Rydin’s J/121, taking 1st in the 2025 ORC Double Handed European Championships, 1st in the 2024 IRC Two-Handed class in the Roschier Baltic Sea Race, 3rd in the 2022 ORC Double Handed Worlds and 9th in the 2021 Rolex Fastnet Race among his many good results. Over lunch our talk soon drifted from boats to family. Johan told


me about his wife’s project developing a digital meeting place for elderly people in Sweden, encouraging social companionship. In building the system she works with ‘personas’ to help her picture the type of user, for example, Anna, an 80-year-old woman living alone who wants more social contact. It struck us both that this way of thinking applies just as well to rating systems. If we start by picturing different types of sailors or owners as


‘personas’, it becomes much easier to explain various rating systems and what the market really needs. So let’s give it a try and look at each type of owner in turn. (Disclaimer, these personas are not real and do not refer to any individual in sailing... honestly).


40 SEAHORSE So first we have Barry ‘Back-of-the-Beer-Mat’ Thompson. Barry’s


weapon of choice is a 1980s cruiser-racer, something like a Moody 34 with sails older than most of his crew. He thrives under the local sailing club’s empirical handicap system, where results are based on last week’s performance and if he bought the handicapper a pint. He considers weighing the boat an act of sacrilege and is convinced that ‘sail area’ is just a conspiracy dreamt up by sailmakers to sell him more Dacron. So Barry is a prime candidate for a handicap system. To be clear,


a handicap system adjusts a boat’s results based on observed past performance rather than precise measurements of the boat itself; essentially, the rating is tweaked depending on how fast (or slow) the boat actually sails in real races and so is as much a reflection on the skill of the crew. These systems are typically ‘yardstick’ style, where the goal is


to level the playing field across a very diverse fleet. Examples include PHRF in North America, ECHO in Ireland, RYA NHC (recently replaced by YTC) in the UK, and PHS in Australia and New Zealand. For Barry this means that he can compete fairly with newer, faster boats without needing to submit detailed measurements or invest in cutting-edge equipment. He just shows up, sails and lets the system sort out his results. Next in the personas we have Monica ‘Measuring-Tape’ Müller.


Monica sails a tidy 35-footer, something like a Oceanis 35, and is happy with rating systems that involve a few straightforward measurements: hull dimensions, sail dimensions and that’s about it. She can be found on the dock with a tape measure, carefully


PHIL UHL


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