Why Doesn't The "number" Correspond To A Yacht's Length?
For the International Rule, the rating number is approximately equal to the sailing length of the hull. These boats have long overhangs which allow the waterline length to increase as the boat heels over. A displacement hull's maximum speed (the hull speed) is directly proportional to the square root of its waterline length.
The first rating rules were first expressed as the weighted sum of various speed factors such as length and sail area. Later rules included resistance factors, such as draught or freeboard. These resistance factors could either be subtracted from the speed factors or used as divisors of the speed factors. Some rules thus took the form of fractions—some "trivial", where the divisor was merely a constant, and others "non-trivial", where the divisor was a resistance factor. The Union Rule was a trivial fraction (the divisor being "150") and the Universal Rule non-trivial (the divisor being 5 times the cube root of the draught).
It was the illustrious architect, Dixon Kemp, who began the tradition of expressing British rules as trivial fractions with a divisor of "2", thus starting the tradition of the age old question:
"Since your boat is a Six metre, why is it 12 metres long?"
Read more about this topic: International Rule (sailing)
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