Club Starting procedures

Originally posted by tgruitt Don't most clubs use an automated start box?

We'd need to upgrade our committee boat considerably for any kind of half sophisticated electronics to have much of a life on it I think. And we'd certainly much rather have the hassle of manual systems than a fixed point starts and finish box. Fine for river clubs or odd shaped lakes where you can't run open water courses anyway, but for middle sized open water clubs like ours the convenience of the electronics would compromise the racing too much. Once you have a large committee boat with the capability to run full electronics *and keep them operating* it becomes an option again of course. If money were no object I'd love to have a committee boat with a big digital clock on the side so club sailors wouldn't have to bother with watches.

Edited by JimC - 04 Feb 14 at 11:55am

Originally posted by sandgrounder   I understand that once the trial of the new system is complete the intention is to fully automate it.

We have an automated system that runs the timing and the hooter. It is neither bulky nor difficult to maintain. The whole system sits in a beautifully crafted wooden box (totally unnecessary but that's the way the box was made) which contains a 12v small car battery and under the lid an A5 sized plastic box with the electronics Gubbins which displays the programme being used and the countdown / count up timing and there is also a manual pushbutton control that the RO can use to signal boats over the line.

This plastic box can be unplugged from the wooden battery container and taken off the committee boat up to the duty box for the finish (we normally have the start on the water but finish on a fixed line from duty box). The countup time is displayed in seconds (removes one cause of calculation error) and as a boat finishes, the elapsed time is noted down as finishing hooter is sounded. You can also play back finishing times later but this is only rarely used.

The battery box also has a plug socket so that the battery can be plugged in to a charger at the end of the day. The electronics box has some D batteries which are changed each year.

This has worked for us for quite a few years and if duty crew are in short supply, the race officer can run the start sequence singlehanded. As a well known optimist, I also start my own watch at the first gun - during the finish of one race, a visitor and yours truly were falling about laughing at the antics on the water and managed to knock the electronics box off its perch and dislodged the internal battery connection so losing the time.

As for starting sequence for class starts, we have 1) Menagerie fleet (usually Phantom, Lark & Vago), 2) Merlin Rocket 3) Laser 4) Gp14. 5) Solo. 6) Comet. This sequence enables the various fleets to spread out in reasonably clear wind rather than bunching up when the faster boats catch up the slow.

Marke,

Can you PM me with details of Starcross's light system. We have been toying with the idea for about 15yrs and are currently looking into it again and Starcross has been mentioned during numerous occassions.
Details of lights used, timing system etc. would be grateful.

Cheers

Paul

Originally posted by JimC I was thinking I ought to write a smartphone app that does the sequence and calls out a countdown and the flags combined with taking a video. Then you could point the camera along the line and have a video of any OCS and have the timing automated... All you'd need to do would be obey instructions on what flags to use (it would call them out too) and it would be portable electronics that wouldn't need to stay on the boat.