About YardStick-Flicker
A tool for managing yardsticks for yacht race results.
This tool is designed to help Race Officers with Yardstick calculations and adjustments for entry of finish times for off-the-beach yacht races.
1. Time conversion
It converts clock start times and finish times into elapsed times (hours, minutes & seconds — plus total seconds).
2. The 20 yardstick buttons
There are a series of 20 buttons provided on the index page, pre-selected on the Yardsticks page in the order you want. These can be updated from the Australian Sailing list by uploading an updated CSV file on the Yardsticks page.
3. Corrected time calculator
Corrected times can be calculated by selecting one of the yardsticks, using the formula:
corrected time = elapsed time × 100 / yardstick
The corrected time is shown in hours, minutes and seconds, and in total seconds.
4. Elapsed time simulations
These calculations are done for two purposes:
A. Sail size variations within a class
Many clubs encourage skippers to use different size sails for different wind strengths and conditions. In high winds they may enter and sail when they would be overwhelmed with the sail size they nominated as an entrant in a series. The club may decide to combine their results rather than have multiple entrants. This can be done by using the ratio of their entrant yardstick to their race sail option yardstick to estimate a simulated elapsed time.
Worked example
Change from Laser Full (entrant; yardstick 114) to Laser Radial (on the day; yardstick 118.5), with 50 minutes elapsed time:
50 min (3000 sec) × 114 / 118.5 = 48 minutes 6 seconds (2886.08 secs)
This would be entered as the elapsed time for the Entrant (Laser Full) into your race results program, under the Laser Full class — the same way any other finisher's elapsed time is entered. That program applies the usual yardstick correction from there; nothing further needs to happen in this tool.
B. Combining classes for one skipper
While most clubs would require skippers who want to sail more than one class in a series to have two or more separate entries in the results, there may be special cases where combining classes for the one skipper is desirable. For example, say members of a local sailing school who are also members of the host club want to race various classes of yachts borrowed from the school — the classes might be Heron, Pico, Open Bic, Laser, Spiral, etc.
To avoid having separate entrants for each of these skipper/class combinations, the sail size variant calculation above is applied. In the results their class would be listed as ‘Various’ with, say, a Laser Full yardstick of 114. So this tool can be used to simulate what their adjusted elapsed time would be if they'd sailed a Laser Full instead of a Pico. This avoids a huge number of skipper/class combinations on the entrant list, and provides a reasonably fair way of allowing them to compete with a combined score for the ‘Various’ class in the race results.