I’m not totally clued up on ECHO, but from experience NHC is not great unless your fleet are happy with personal handicapping.
For me NHCs biggest failings, is the inability to sail identical boats off of fixed yardstick and the fact that the baseline numbers are complete tosh!
Other alternatives are a sudo measurement system such as Byron which uses measurements aligned with historical PY numbers for known classes. The issue with this is that the guy who runs it can be slow to supply a number unless you donate some cash to his business
and some of the assumptions are a bit basic.
If your members want a measurement system then your best bet is probably IRC which I believe is now cheaper than it was and will allow your members to compete in all the big events under IRC.
It really depends on what your members want to do.
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“patrick.blaney@phblaney.com [sailwave]” sailwave@yahoogroups.com wrote:
I have been running results at a small cruiser racing club for the past 2 years using ECHO handicapping ( we are in Ireland).
While I can see that there are many parameters that you can adjust in ECHO, I see that in NHC many of those choices are effectively made for you.
The characteristics of our racing are that we have a small fleet (10 to 18 boats) which race regularly over a 22 weekly race season (typical race is 2 to 3 hours - 12 miles) broken into 4 series of 5 races, plus 2 longer races (5 to 6 hours) about
25 miles at which far more boats (upwards of 50) compete. On any given race day, there will be a wide variety of boats competing (so the active fleet is inconsistent in its composition), with widely differing crew capabilities (the same boat in 2 races may
compete with quite different crews) and in widely differing winds (so the results for 1 boat might be all light winds and for another all heavy winds). So it is inherently difficult to get any consistency. Looking at results after the fact, we see that races
are won more often by the irregular competitors who come out in conditions that suit their boat, and where they crew up appropriately rather than the regulars who come out all the time with often the same crew composition. Our handicapping adjustments have
been slow to penalise the better performers (relatively), especially when they don’t race regularly, probably because our weightings weren’t adjusted properly.
I would like to use NHC in 2015 as that seems to have thought through most of the issues that might impact our fleet and tries to adjust that fairly and consistently, but also reasonably progressively too. The RYA does a good job explaining (to non
mathematicians like me) what the methodology is trying to do. Is there a similar explanation available for ECHO.
My preference is to use a handicapping system that leaves the judgement out as much as possible, and so wanted the advice of this expert group as to which is better ECHO or NHC in our particular circumstances.
Thanks for your help!