The GPS-SS guys are keen to include a distance ranking in the website. They are talking about a 12 hour category.
There is some indecision though as they would like to keep it compatible with the existing GPSTC records which don't have a 12 hour time limit (Dave's record of 511km is over 14 hours).
What would be your advice to them regarding the duration of the category?
12hrs?, 18 hrs? 24 hours? One day?
I am particularly interested in comments from people who are actually interested in seriously going for big distances and/or are at the 200km + mark now in the GPS-TC
I think calendar day to fit in with GPSTC. Can't see a real advantage in 18 or 24 hrs. Not that I am in the 200+ club (yet)
A calendar day as well to be fair for everyone, we can only really go for distane in the summer months with daylight savings as most times the seabreeze is not good enough till after lunch, I took just over 7 hours to join the club from 1pm to 8pm then the breeze just wasn't enough to keep powered up on my 5.8 with still an hour till dark, the frontal wind in winter just isn't consistent enough to go for distance, i hope to break my pb next summer.
1 calender day, (or 24 hour hours.)
Thats how GPSTC calculate any session data, for any two team members. As long as any two sail in same 24 hour block, its a session score.
Calendar day is my preference, which must reset at midnight local time.
This means that someone can't start at midday, sail till dark, then start again the next morning after a good night's sleep and sail till midday that day. I think someone tried to claim a record like this last year.
Anything over 200 is a big effort, I dips my lid to all the others in that exclusive club 
24hrs anytime please
to keep it the same as Guiness World Records and WSRC. 12hr is too much like a long one hr where a 24hr is more like a marathon and a test of endurance. A 12hr won,t get much more than 400-450km
I agree with Nebs, midnight to midnight, that way it's the same date on the GPS file.
Meaning any distance done on a specific date is valid, once the date changes that's the end.
As long as the unit is set to local time.
I disagree w Nebbs on one issue coz I reckon anything over 156km is a great effort!!!
Thanks guys, keep the opinions coming.
Regarding 24 hours and a 'calender day'. Note that when using a GPS the concept is a bit meaningless. It can be set to any time zone and it is always a single day somewhere in the world. Personally, I agree with Kato that it does not matter the date, as long as it is within the 24 hours period. If some guys want s to sail all night on a full moon because that is when the best sea and wind conditions are, so be it.
Anyhow, I don't think a GT-31 or GT-11 would last much more than 16-18 hours before the battery was flat. Of course you could always stop for a while and charge it up without turning it off. 
I agree with Nebbian, midnight to midnight. I think of it as how far you can sail in a day: so you can say Saturday I sailed 200kms (not that I did, no wind
).
I do not see it is a good idea limiting it to 12 hours. We get longer days in summer and shorter in winter, that is just another aspect of the conditions we battle! If people want to travel to a great spot to do 2 seconds maybe they will do the same for 18 hours of daylight. That does not matter to me because when you get there to do well in any of the divisions you still need: enough wind in the right direction etc, skill, equipment, strength, sheer tenacity and more to complete either a great 2 sec or distance score.
My best distance was in 12.25 hours but in that time I had a 6 hours of 13kts and slower as the wind was fickle. I ran out of light at the end of the day, another choice made by me as I do not fancy the idea of sailing after dark as if you are in the water unable to start you are very hard to see, another choice not carrying flares.
also
I cannot see it is about sailing a distance in 24 hours for example: 100kms on from noon on Saturday then 100 kms before noon on sunday and calling it 200kms next day.... bit like claiming to have run a marathon when you ran 5 miles a day over 5 consecutive days.
Its a computer system... you can actually have both (or all three as is being discussed in this context).
My personal preference is that 12hr is the least wanted... Northern Europe can have nearly 20hrs of sunlight in summer, so why limit it? And 12hrs still allows for night-before + morning-after.
24 hrs, not that i will go out for that long.its there own risk to sail at night.
2009 "Banque Populaire 5 131 ft Tri, Pascal Bidegorry FRA, 908.2nm(1682km) at an average speed of 37.84 kts.
The current 24 hour record holder!
We can't beat this so I think we should go for 23 hours
Seriously though I think it should be 24 and I am leaning towards calendar day.
I'm not sure how the analysis software guys would go with this.
For my part, ka72.com gives you the distance travelled over a midnight-to-midnight period.
If you sail (or walk, or ski, or drive, or steamboat or whatever) overnight and upload the file to ka72.com, it breaks it into multiple sessions based on the 24 hour time window.
Also, ka72.com can't know for sure what your timezone is (there are all sorts of mad rules about this, and they change all the time. Even a big company like Microsoft can't get it right all the time, so what chance do I have? See support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/305575)
So the software makes a guess about your timezone (you can see the estimated timezone on the main screen and on the biglist page for each track uploaded.)
All of this is fairly irrelevant for windsurfing, which is almost exclusively a daytime sport.
However, if one of the competitions were to decide to impose a 12hr limit on distance measures, then I think all the software would need extra work to add that as a category.
Dylan.
