Sailing race timing equipment

helmsman

I don't think there is a good solution for recording finishes if you can't see the sail numbers.  I know some of the big boat races are using RFID and transponder technology - but I don't see this filtering down to toppers in the near future ;-).  Personally I would like to do away with sail numbers and use bow numbers - that would make writing race management software a lot easier!.

Recording a number of boats finishing in close order is a problem with any system - paper or computer.  A computer system can help in reducing what has to be recorded and takes away the need for the OOD to decide whether a time has to be recorded or which race/fleet/start a particular boat is in.  in our system the OOD simply clicks the boat on a list when they cross the line each lap - the system records the time, performs the corrected time calculation and updates the current race positions in each race.  This list approach works pretty well up to about 50 boats and then screen scrolling can become a bit of a problem - we use fleet grouping and some predictive ordering to reduce the amount of screen scrolling - but there inevitably a few occasions (five boats finishing simultaneously for example) when you can click all five boats at the correct time.

The approach I use to deal with mass finishes when doing my OOD duty with our computer system is to recognise when a close finish is coming up and then focus on clicking (timing) the first finisher correctly and then use paper to jot down the finishing order of the boats in the scrum with approximate gaps from the first boat (e.g. Finn 231 +2 secs, RS200 +1sec etc.).  Then once the bunch has gone through I can revert to the normal timing approach using the computer - when I have a little gap in the finishers I can then quickly add the times to the boats I noted down using the first of the bunch as a reference.  This works really well as long as you think ahead and see the bunch coming.

At Hunts we have been trying for years to replace our ageing 'block box' that was built by a club member some 15 or so years ago.

The problem we have is that we do not have a fixed start line so we need a portable solution that is easy to use (and a laptop really is not a solution).

The current unit interfaces to some car type air horns to give the audible alert and the flags are done manually.

Finishing is as simple as recording every boat and time (regardless of the fleet it started with) then ignoring those boats that are fleet racing. The only issue is when we run fast and slow handicap the OOD needs to remember to add 3 minutes to the fast fleet elapsed time (we use 6-3-go as that is what the box supports and we find if we use 5-4-1-go we have boats from the first fleets off coming back through the line.

For opens we use 5-4-1-go doing the 4 and 1 manually with the flags (we always use experienced OODs for open events).

It works quite well, fleet captains are responsible for picking their results up and collating them as they see fit, we do encourage posting on the club website but in reality only the club "all-in" events go there becasue we have a nominated person doing those as no fleet captain is responsible.

For a club of our size where all duties are done by the members (we have no piad staff) it does work quite well with the more experienced members supporting the less experienced members.