For the local
sailing club, I developed a Portsmouth Yardstick sailboat race calculator
and race scoring program. This allows us to enter and easily
keep track of race scores.
Our club supports a wide variety of boats, so we need to use a
handicapping system to align all the different types of boats.
This makes the scoring results more fair, as a slower boat will
have its time reduced, while a faster boat will have its time
increased. For finished times, boats are handicapped based on
the
Portsmouth Yardstick
to produce a "comparable" score. The Portsmouth Yardstick is
nice because it contains a large number of supported boats, and
where possible, provides specific handicaps for different wind
conditions. Different boats handle differently in different wind
conditions, so this serves to make the handicapping more
accurate.
As racers cross the finish line, they get a wall time. This wall
time is then adjusted, higher for faster boats and lower for
slower boats (according to the Yardstick), to produce the
handicapped time that is used for final skipper placement in a
race.
The scoring program I wrote generates static HTML from a variety
of input files, consisting of races throughout the years. It
allows tracking skipper progress throughout the various seasons,
as well as statistics per skipper, per boat, and per series, for
some additional analysis. It also cross-checks all results at
build time, before publishing, against another scoring program
written by another club member. This program was written earlier
from the same requirements and serves as a third-party check
that the scores are correct before publishing results.
Current scores for the program may be found at
Race Scores,
based on the
source.
