Had a nasty surprise this afternoon scoring an ORC distance race. This is part of a three day event which usually includes a long upwind day, a shorter downwind and a third day can be a bit of a reach or anyway mixed course of wind directions.
ORC has recently offered a 5 number system for Predominately Upwind, Predominately Downwind and an All Purpose range as well. Along with a host of other ratings for WL and other stuff.
This is a good fit for our event. But it requires managing 15 ratings, which is a serious PITA, and the Windrats string can be very long. Turns out there is about 100 char max to the string.
A rating string with 15 values looks like this:
0.8232, 0.9961, 1.1447, 1.2435, 1.2947, 0.7942, 0.9493, 1.0745, 1.149, 1.1827, 0,7833, 0.9686, 1.1444, 1.2813, 1.3679
So if you happen to have a windy day, as we did, and find yourself specifying 5DW5-MH or 5DW-H (ORC speak for 5 number downwind Medium-High or High), and if your 15 number string has the downwind values at the end, they are truncated. No ratings.
So a fix is needed, if possible, to stretch the Windrats string to something larger, like maybe 200 chars.
As a general squeeky wheel again, while I understand that SW is intended primarily for dinghies in the UK, we do use it for our big boat events, and of course mostly it works like a charm. Yet SW does a lousy job of managing ratings. We can get them in from a remote file using an interesting kludge around the class description (change it to sail number) and no one is looking for more work. But ratings are a part of life, and it would be lovely to see some progress in this direction. An external file with sail number, standard rating and windrats would do the trick, because then we could use external software to generate the rating files.
Anyway . . . .
After a couple of anxious hours this afternoon, I think all is well. Phone has not been ringing in any case. Just watch out for Windrats!
jrc
