As we announced last Fall following the departure of Panerai as title sponsor and series organizer, CYOA has stepped in as administrator of the Classic Yachts Challenge Series.  For 2019, the series was comprised of the same five regattas as 2018: the Corinthian Classic Yacht Regatta, the Nantucket Regatta, the Opera House Cup, the Herreshoff Classic Yacht Regatta and the Newport Classic Yacht Regatta.  

We'd heard some rumblings that the scoring system used by Panerai in the past seemed confusing, so we tried a new system this year called the High Point Percentage system.  The concept is pretty straightforward and completely transparent: The total possible points you got under the high point scoring system for each race is divided by the total number of points you could have gotten had you won every race.  You must have sailed in three events to qualify, and for each boat that qualified, we took their best five races and combined the numerators and denominators to come up with an aggregate percentage.  It's not as complicated as it may sound, however, it did require that we rescore each event using the high point system and reclassify boats into their appropriate divisions (eg. Vintage, Classic, Modern Classic and Spirit of Tradition).

In the end, 13 boats qualified for the series, and the division winners were as follows:

Vintage: Dorade
Classic: Westray
Modern Classic: Valiant
Spirit of Tradition: Blackfish

Congratulations to Matt Brooks, Juan Corradi, Gary Gregory, Ron & Carolyn Zarrella and their teams for their hard-earned victories.  They won't be winning an expensive timepiece this year, but we'll have something special for them at the CYOA Annual Meeting & Winter Classic Party on November 16th (more on this below).

Full Results: classicyachts.org/series