DaySailer.org Forum

Newbie question for someone looking to get into the class. Which builders/hull numbers are considered best for racing? I see the DS III is not class legal, is this still true?

Thanks

Welcome Aboard !! The DSIs are preferred over the DSIIs for all out competition but a lot really comes down to the sailor. If you are looking for an entry level boat at entry level prices there are many for sale although you may have to travel to get one. If money is no object you could check into the new DSI versions built by Cape Cod Boats. They have the more modern attributes of a DSII but are classified as a DSI.
http://www.capecodshipbuilding.com/site/daysailer.htm

The DSIIIs, although great boats are not class legal due to hull design changes. You could look into a new class for DSIIIs ? Brad

It's possible to arrive a some answer to this question based on the data that are already available on this site.

I looked at the results for the 2009 and 2010 national championships and plotted them in a scatter plot, ranking vs. hull number. By adding more results, you could improve the conclusiveness of this analysis.

Here's what I found:

Sail numbers above 11,000 are scattered through the top half of the fleet, with two exceptions (but those boats probably didn't race at all for some reason, they had the worst score of all boats).

There were very few boats in the 4,000 to 11,000 range, only 6% of the total. One scored well, the others poorly. Statistically, only the fact that few in that range participate at all would seem to be significant (unless additional results are integrated to get more data). That range seems to be disproportionately represented by DSII's (looking at the unofficial sail number index on this site) which corroborates the statement that DSII's are not as (or not perceived as) competitive.

In the range of sail numbers from 1 to 4,000 the results are very evenly spread, with no real clustering. Ranging from the best results to near the worst in the championships. This even spread could mean that the boats in that range are all roughly equal, or that both boat performance and crew performance are randomly distributed wrt. sail number.

What is clear is that these older boats seem to make up the majority of entrants into the championships.

(In the early years sail number and hull number are different, sail number is what gets recorded in the race results).

GreenLake - Your study takes out the guess work and rumors. The DSI definitely prevails in the data. Do you know if any of boats were the modern Cape Cod Ship Building models ? Brad

Brad,

It's a fun little exercise, but in the end I decided to leave my effort at "data mining" as a bit of a "sketch". Enough to show the possibilities, but not carrying it out to where it would qualify as real research - others can do that. (One would need 3-4 more championship results to get decent statistics).

As a active class the DS is very not very large (compared to the number of boats built the DSA membership is relatively small). That means you get all sorts of effects in the data. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader

Likewise with your question - you can look up the race results on the home page and correlate it with the "hull number index" under the "Technical Info" in the menu at the top of this page. YMMV.