Sailwave or HAL

We are looking at changing our club computer system and programmes for calculating results of handicap racing. We currently use and old bespoke system.

Or problem is that our race officers only do 2 duties a year, so any system would have to be very easy and intuitave to use. We would like the system to also be able to send returns to the RYA for PY adjustment.

Any comments or suggestions?

Thanks
Seabadgers's mum
(She's left the computer signed in again!)

Sailwave is a great piece of software, but our experience is that its not something you can pick up on the day you are OOD.  You need to get some experience of using it before trying to produce the results.  If you have ~30 OODs during the year I think that is going to be hard to do.

Most clubs use sailwave by having a results officer/fleet captain who takes the elapsed times from the OODs and creates the race and series results.  A results officer can quickly pick up how to use Sailwave effectively.  The problem with this approach is that it can take a while to generate the results and often the results officer has problems intrepreting the information provided by the OODs (e.g. matching up competitors for series results) - unless you have a results officer who can work alongside the OODs to get the results out quickly.

At our club we wanted the results out quickly (a few minutes after the race finishes) and we wanted to reduce the complexity for OODs and Results Officer.  We developed our own software that both times the race and generates the individual race and series results and automatically publishes them to our website.  Its not been easy, but over a period of a couple of years we have refined a system that works pretty well with a wide variety of OODs.  We continue to develop the system and next year we will introduce computer based signon/off which further reduces the work for the OODs (and puts the onus on the competitors to enter correctly).


Edited by marke

Sailwave. Free to download, easy to use. Latest versions let you import selected competitors from previous series (and from more than one) which is just genius for clubs with many of the same competitors doing the series or for our cvrda open events where turnout is unpredictable and handicaps are boat specific and we need previous info.

Edited by patj

Originally posted by marke I would be interested to know of clubs that have their OODs using Sailwave to produce the results immediately after each race . . and how they configure Sailwave to make this as easy as possible . . and do you use rota'd OODs

We do - have about 30 ood's rota'd over the season, although I am off this weekend as the pond is frozen!   Production of the results is one of the jobs of the OOD's

For the thursday night (40 boats+) handicap racing in the summer the results are generated straight after racing, and usually by the time your on that 1st beer they get brought upstairs. Ditto for club trophy days and other one off events. In theory they're meant to be printed out every race day for the handicap fleets, but given we're pretty good at getting them put on the website, then I tend not to bother unless the handicap fleet is particularly large that day.

As to how SW is setup to facilitiate this - I'm not sure exactly as I'm not a sailwave god - I just follow the printed instructions and it usually works ok. I'm sure I could put you in touch with the club's sailwave god if you'd like further input - drop me a pm.

Originally posted by marke At our club we wanted the results out quickly (a few minutes after the race finishes) and we wanted to reduce the complexity for OODs and Results Officer.  We developed our own software that both times the race and generates the individual race and series results and automatically publishes them to our website.  Its not been easy, but over a period of a couple of years we have refined a system that works pretty well with a wide variety of OODs.  We continue to develop the system and next year we will introduce computer based signon/off which further reduces the work for the OODs (and puts the onus on the competitors to enter correctly).

Sounds like a great idea - I do agree with some of your comments about sailwave not being totally easy for a novice user to add a set of results into a club series. I had a play around with it when doing the series results for the 4000 fleet, but as we had a slightly unusually scoring system (100 pts for DNE) I found it easier to stick to my excel skills. However I've usually managed to produce the results using sailwave for the club.

However I'm also not sure I'd rush to develop my own software - what happens when the member responsible for writing it gets ill, leaves, moves house or finds another hobby. Is the source-code documented? are there others within the club that understand how the nuts and bolts works etc  You also then miss out on the advantages offered when there is a new release of sailwave - e.g. the auot-generation of the handicap returns..


Edited by laser4000

Laser4000
I took over the development from a previous member - not too hard; its written in a fairly straighforward open source technology stack.

I'm hoping to get a couple of other clubs using the software this year, so that I can investigate variations that I need to cope with beyond what we need at my local club (which is already pretty variable  - class, handicap, pursuit, average lap, laser rig merging etc..   I have a some clubs interested and they are already helping me define the changes necessary.

If all goes well this year, I'll make it open source and open it up to development by anybody who wants to get involved - just got some ugly code to fix first!





Edited by marke