To get a rating, you applied to the local board, and if there was no "base"
rating to start with, they granted a provisional rating based on what their
opinion of what your performance would be. This might change significantly
if their guess was off initially. The idea was to develop a standard which
measured how fast a properly prepared boat sailed with an experienced crew.
It works about as well as any other.
The P19 equivalent rating of "300" comes from the formula used to convert
Portsmouth yardstick to PHRF. At 300, a Catalina 22 (292) would owe a P19 8
seconds per mile. A zero PHRF boat owes a P19 five minutes per mile, and
many modern hulls carry minus ratings. I am a little fuzzy on whether this
is time-on-time or time-on-distance, something that apparently matters to
many.
>I don't yet do PHRF, and its not that simple. People have thrown the figure
>"300" around a lot, but my understanding of PHRF is that a PHRF NW rating
>might not coincide very closely with a rating given by one of the other
PHRF
>organizations, and some have a minimum length on 20', though for PHRF its
>18'.
>