Seasalter Sailing Club

Write Your Sub Menu Here

Affiliated Club

Hosted by:

Pursuit Racing - A quick guide

When you look through the clubs timetable for this year you will see that a number of the races are called pursuit races. Some of you may not have come across this type of racing before this quick guide is for you :

A pursuit race is a handicap race of a fixed duration with a number of class starts based on the PY numbers of the boats taking part. The class starts occur at an interval whereby all the boats would finish together, ie their handicaps are eliminated at the start and thus its a first past the post race.

This type of racing can lead to close racing and also for the competitors it means that the results can be quickly worked out since its where you finish on the water !. Compared to traditional handicap racing where the results of a particular race may take several weeks to become known the benefits are obvious.

The race officer has to be capable of working out all the start times for each class of boat taking part in the race and then notifying the competitors about the signals used for each start. The starts are by far the most confusing part of the race and good race management is put at a premium.

For the various formulas used by pursuit racing refer to this page.

Club member Steve Willis has produced this document covering the classes sailed at Seasalter with a few others to allow easier and speedier working with Pursuit Racing.

The RYA have a PDF document available detailing Pursuit racing this is available here.-