New inexperienced user needing guidance

Good afternoon everybody,
I found myself holding the King’s Shilling and taking on the role of race officer at the cruising club I recently joined who wish to start doing some friendly club races. I did some research and think the best option for us is the National Handicap for Cruisers using progressive handicap as we will have a mixed fleet. I downloaded ‘Sailwave’ (2.2.9.0) which seemed to be the perfect and widely used option but am completely flumoxed. The test series I tried to do looks nothing like the example; I tried reading the user guide but was lost by page 18, I don’t understand computer or software terminology and am at the point of giving up; so if anybody has some very simple to understand pointers they could offer it would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks
Ian

Hi Ian,
If you are free today I can have a zoom call or similar with you and talk you through it.
If you have never seen it done it can be a bit daunting but it really is quite simple
I’m probably going to be busy if it is not today (Now is good) - Use the Live chat on the Sailwave.com website and we can set something up - Otherwise I’m sure someone else will help you

Jon

Hi Ian.,
Welcome to Sailwave and the place to get help. I see Jon has offered you a Zoom or similar call to get you started. As Jon said it can be daunting if you have never done anything similar before.

The first thing I suggest you do is get a list of all the boats that are likely to be taking part, together in a spreadsheet. The information you need are things like boat sail number, boat name, helm name and type of boat (class in Sailwave terms). Once you have a list of boat types you can see if there is a base rating/handicap in the list available for download from the RYA website. The other alternative is to start all boats with a base rating of 1.0.

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I look forward to helping you in your Sailwave journey.
Kind regards,
Huw

Dear Jon,
Thank you so much for your help and time. I’ll try another test series tomorrow so fingers crossed and Huw, I will keep you in the loop too and may need to pick your brains too.

Thank you both
Ian