After 17 race weeks, handicapping is over for the year. Good weather this summer…with only 2 rainouts. The last night (9/22) was casual sailing and awards were given out. There were 9 Fairwinds...another great turnout. I couldn't make it...thanks to Judd for doing the honors. This year racing was handicapped by boat class not by skipper experience, thinking that we all got the experience we needed last year. Smaller (slower) boats left first by 30-60 seconds. Seemed to work well until only certain classes of boats showed up, so we all left at the same time. Still proved to be some great racing. A total of 19 sailors participated this year compared to 23 last year. One night we only had 3 boats (threatening rain), but most nights 6-9 boats would be racing. Scores were entered weekly on our Excel spreadsheet (thanks Tony Johnson) and emailed to all sailors (and 11 more) with a short description of the previous evening’s excitement. Five different classes got their keels wet…16 Fairwinds, 7 ODOMs, 4 EC12s, 2 Lasers and 1 Marblehead. We sailed 17 heats of 6 races totaling 102 races…not including the 5-6 fun races afterwards. Lot of thumb time! So when it came time to give out awards, an important calculation was attendance. Three trophies were given out…Keith Gates was first by sailing 76% of the time with his Fairwind. Larry Wheeler took second at 70% sailing a Fairwind (Tradewind), ODOM and EC12. Fred Ferris had 65% for third, and sailed his Fairwind, ODOM and Laser. I was there every race night (Fairwind and EC12)...but that’s only because I had to run the darn thing…!!! LOL

All but two sailors’ averages went down during the series…does that mean everyone just got better and prevented anyone from dominating? That’s the hope… The other part of the awards was to find the sailor who sailed at least 60% of the races (a threshold set last year) and had the best point difference between Week 1 Avg. and Final Avg. Since Keith, Larry and Fred were the only ones that fit the criteria of 60%, their point differences for all classes they raced were averaged. Keith won Best Point Difference with +.27. Congratulations...last year he won the award for Most Improved! I’d like to thank everyone that competed and had fun. Also thanks to those that helped with scoring, buoys and running the tape. There has been discussion on whether next year should be just different fleets each Thursday night instead of handicapping. To make handicap purposeful, different classes need to race against each other…but that happened only occasionally. More discussion will pursue before next ice out. All comments welcome terry@mackeyszar.com. See you next year!