Early Saturday Splash for The Vaucluse Challenge

The first heat of our annual Vaucluse Challenge (VC) will be held this Saturday. For those who are new to the club, this is a hard-fought and longstanding tradition, where we battle it out against our well-heeled rivals from the French enclave for the glory of holding the perpetual trophy at our club for the following year. 

This heat of the VC is being hosted by Vaucluse. The second heat in the new year will be at DBSC. Because we must travel up to Vaucluse we will have a briefing at 12 noon and a splash no later than 1pm.

The race starts at 2pm as usual, but the format and scoring is different (and more complex) than previous years. Here are the main points: 

Format:

• Two races of approximately 45 minutes (four races in total in the series), with the hosting club to decide the course layout and sequence. We will discuss the course at the briefing on Saturday.

• For each race, there will be separate starts for Standards and for combined Radials/4.7s. If there are at least six 4.7s, including at least one from each club, there will be a separate 4.7 start. 

Scoring: 

(Warning—you may need an advanced maths degree to understand these rules, but fear not, we will review all on Saturday. For those of you who want to see even more details about the scoring and the full rules of the Challenge please click here.)

There will be two elements to the scoring – overall order of finishing and age-based order of finishing. 

Overall order of finishing– in each race, the first n boats in each Starting Fleet from each club will be allocated a score of 1 to 2n in accordance with their relative order of finishing (regardless of their actual position in the finish), where n = the number of boats in that Starting Fleet from the club with the smallest fleet in that class, provided n≤4. 

Age-based order of finishing– in each race, each Starting Fleet will be separated into aged-based “Scoring Divisions”. Within each Scoring Division, the first m boats from each club will be allocated a score of 1 to 2m in accordance with their relative order of finishing within that Scoring Division (regardless of their actual position in the finish), where m = the lesser of 1/3 of the boats in that Scoring Decision and the number of boats in that Scoring Division from the club with the smallest number of boats in that division. 

For each race, the score for each club will be the aggregate of the scores from both types of scoring. In determining the winner of the Vaucluse Challenge, the scores for each club from all four races will be aggregated, to provide an overall score for that club.

Okay, I warned you that it was complicated. But suffice it to say, we need everyone to sail their best to come out on top!