There have been many rumors and much speculation about the IRC Rule, so this is the first in a series of informational bulletins on the "new rule in town".

Having gone thru the process of getting a certificate and having participated in one of the classes that the rule was designed to address, I think that this is the best system yet. What I have observed is that the ratings for boats under IRC very closely match the potential performance of these boats in the real world. The rule really only changed things for boats of PHRF 50 and down and "sport boats"

This is good because PHRF has not done a very good job dealing with boats that can plane and those ultra-lightweight boats with a high crew to boat weight ratio (movable ballast).

There had also been a tendency to think of PHRF 1 as a lower limit, combined with a focus of trying to balance fleet racing to boats above and below PHRF 100 caused the establishment of benchmarks, which then became fixed, setting some ratings higher than they should have been relative to other boats.

The new rule really addresses this problem as well as providing a rating that you can take anywhere in the world and race. Now that may not mean a lot to those who don't leave Fishers Sound, but for anyone wishing to explore waters beyond our door it is a big thing.

The racing we have done so far under IRC has been very close ( we race in the PHRF plus or minus 60 to zero class), and no one seems to have a real advantage once they optimize their boats (a subject I will address in a later article).

I have listed some ratings below (expressed in PHRF numbers) for some familiar boats.

As you can see the numbers sort themselves out pretty well, the boats that got spanked are, for the most part, the ones you already may have been suspicious of, or they caused a self inflicted penalty by not taking the time to read and declare their data correctly.(this also will be covered in a later column)

Costs for a certificate are $5/lf if you do the measurements yourself and for boats over PHRF 50 this is all that is required. All the forms you need are online @ U.S.Sailing's excellent website.