The Wonderful One of A Kind Fleet

The One of A Kind (OOAK) fleet is at the very core of competitive dinghy sailing in Colorado. It provides an opportunity for sailors with boats that do not have a fleet to race using the Portsmouth Yardstick handicap system. A class of boat without sufficient "sister ships" to warrant a separate fleet may race in OOAK.

This is the largest fleet in the Denver Sailing Association and is actually required by the Association By-Laws. At times there have been over 35 boats in this fleet.

This fleet comes from the old Sloans Lake Sailing Club that was one of the two clubs that merged to form the Denver Sailing Association.

Many of our current fleets started as one or two boats in the OOAK fleet. This includes Lightning,
C-15, Day Sailer, Fireball, MC Scow, Buccaneer, and Snipes.

OOAK racing not only allows non-fleeted boats to race but also provides an opportunity for fleets to grow until they reach a reasonable number. Some skippers have raced in fleets on the regatta circuit and OOAK at the Club because there are not enough of their one design at the Club.

Portsmouth Yardstick Handicapping

The Portsmouth Yardstick is a national (US) system of "handicapping" different kinds of boats by rating their speed potentials, based on previous actual results. Each year, race results from across the country are reported to US SAILING's Portsmouth Committee. From those statistics, rating numbers are derived to quantitatively answer the question, "How much faster is boat A than boat B?"

In Portsmouth, lower rating numbers mean faster boats and higher numbers mean slower boats. For example, an International 505 rated about 80 in 2006 and a Hobie One-9 rated about 120; a 505 should complete the same course as a Hobie One-9 in about two-thirds (80/120) the time. If the Hobie takes 45 minutes to sail the course, the 505 needs to sail the course in 30 minutes in order to tie.

To see the most current Portsmouth ratings for all boats, click here.

How Portsmouth works

The time it takes a boat to complete the race is called its "elapsed time" or "ET". This is adjusted to "corrected time, "CT", by this formula:

CT = 100/rating * ET
(divide the rating number into 100 and multiply by the elapsed time)

Boats are scored on their corrected times, not their order of finish or elapsed times.