At one point her boat had a man overboard in a force 6 in the southern ocean. It's a testament to her skill that he survived. It requires true leadership to keep your cool in those sorts of conditions.
> Dorade’s finishing time in the Transpac race this year was 12 days 5 hours 23 minutes 18 seconds
> Dorade started a week earlier than Pyewacket, which finished the course in 8 days 15 hours 41 minutes 3 seconds.
Still, nice to see wooden hulls aren't dead.
There are a variety of handicapping systems. This race uses TPYC ratings determined by US Sailing [2]
The TPYC rating uses the mainly downwind Transpac Wind Matrix, a Pacific Swell adjustment, a power trim adjustment, and a handicap course length of 2300 nautical miles to establish time allowances from the fastest rated yacht.
Other rating systems include IMS[3], attempting to make predictions of potential boat performance based on detailed hull measurements, and IRC[4], a committee based system trying to avoid attempts to game the handicaps.
[1] http://www.yachtscoring.com/event_documents/728/SI2013.pdf
[2] http://www.transpacrace.com/docs/2013racedocs/NOR2013.pdf
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Measurement_Syste...
Nevertheless its a reasonable rule system, that tends to produce mostly decent boats. Its quite impressive that a yacht from the 20's can be competitive under it.
Incidentally, handicap racing is quite normal in yachting. However, most races have a separate 'outright' division, and depending on the race that often attracts more attention
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Measurement_Syste... is the most common system.
The whole idea of handicapping is to make the race more fair, not less so.
