How would people deal most effiently with this requirement:
4 off back-to-back 35-45 minute average lap races
3 starts, Fast, Medium, slow
up to 130 competitors
GL PY handicaps
possibly 4 laps by fastest boats
Competitor details and starts pre entered.
After each Race: 3 sets of hand written results (2 from committee boat, 1 from line boat)
Information sheets with OCS, recalled start etc.
Lapsheets with each sail number (4 digits) as it crosses the line
Finish sheets with sail number and finish time
Results processing requires:
identifying and entering OCS etc.
counting laps for each boat.
entering finish time and laps into SailWave
checking and cross referencing the results where anomalies occur
We have a system which is pretty reliable but slow. Based on reviewing the times when races were saved, averaging 1½ hours for a 45-minute race without the full complement of 130.
Present system with 2 people:
Choose a set of results as master (most easily legible handwriting)
Do a quick comparison with others.
Person A with SailWave and finish sheet
Person B with all sheets
A gives first sail number and Class (for guessing the number of laps and where to look on multiple sheets)
B goes through list counting occurrences of that number: gets quicker with crossings off and familiarity.
A notes and enters time and laps
A goes on to next sail number on finish list
repeat
Race scored
Anomalies/missing, typos etc. searched out and spot checks against other sheets.
Provisional results published to club website.
Slow and sure, proven, works well without time pressure.
However, this would fall down if the above Saturday race format is postponed until Sunday and competitors and race manager want results in the length of time it takes to pack the boat away and get changed!
For Club racing, the normal process is that the ODs count the laps and enter laps and time, OCS etc on the signing on sheet, removing some of the scorers workload.
We are considering options as an insurance policy for if this occurs, it’s not the sort of thing to sort out on the day.
Is there a best practice availble? note: skill levels and number of volunteers available is not infinate!
Although this is really intended for one designs it could be very useful for counting the laps
It can run stand alone so you could have one person enter the finishing times into Sailwave while another uses the SWGP to count the laps and then enter the number of laps after all the finishing times have been entered
I now remember looking at this sometime in the past, but was then I think, searching for ideas for recording times as well. I will revisit this as it has the big advantage of being able to import into SailWave, a step where e.g. using Excel, would need some work. Having downloaded it, when launched, the programme auto loaded some results from the 2023 Dash which I must have been playing with.
The sort of thing that adds time to processing is e.g. a sail number written down doesn’t exist so you have to go to the other results or discover that on the previous lap and next lap 3 scorpions went around together and for one, 2 digits got reversed.
It loads the most recently opened file with Sailwave, and there is a dropdown where you can select any of the last 20 or so. But you can also browse for any file.
The good thing is that it will load all the Sail Numbers, so as you enter them, it will check that they are correct. As I said previously, it is really intended for one design results, so it doesn’t record times and therefore you shouldn’t use it to update Sailwave. Although if there is sufficient interest for a few, then I could modify it.
I see now about not importing. I assume entering laps afterwards is achieved by double clicking and editing the opened form for each ‘cell’.
I tried Export Sail Nos and Create Spreadsheet just to see what they did but couldn’t really get either to work. The first seemed to ask for a file name to be entered and then said file not found (it is happy to overwrite an existing file) and the second launched excel but gave Powerbasic: Excel could not open a Results.xls. Please check that VBA is installed.
Since my Windows 11 machine initially stopped SWGP writing to the SailWave folder I guess this may be another Microsoft intervention? I have Excel set to allow VBA to run.
My question was generated as an insurance policy for the rare case when there isn’t an over-night break available, so I can’t really expect addition to the code.
The ‘proper’ solution would be to have live lap and timing electronic data creation on the committee boat but that is unlikely to happen with us any time soon.
Hi Paul, Jon,
I’m nowhere near the data transfer software.
Would it help to truncate the sail numbers in SW to just 4 digits? Do you get many duplicates? Possibly use a different column in SW for 4-digit numbers, then you click that column header to order all 130 in ascending order. Makes it easy to find competitors in the order they come off the results sheet, rather than visually searching up and down either that sheet or SW list.
When I suggested something like this before, Jon or Huw pointed out that the sail number wizard (?) will find entries - does it work for any sequence of 4 digits? Again, possibly an easy way of locating competitors working down results sheet - and not missing any!
Please forgive if this is unhelpful gibberish. I’ve retired from SW I used to handle for a club and slightly miss it!
Richard
We have always truncated to the last 4 digits or occasionally been able to get away with three. It is written into the SIs that we can change a sail number by adding a digit if two 4-digit numbers clash.
We also have a four 4 (or three) digit column. We only need to find competitors visually on the lap sheets, this is sped up by instantly knowing the class e.g. a topper is likely to only appear once whereas a 600, three times. The usual issue is digits reversed or mis-read in which case the Wizard is of limited use.
Things happen in club races that shouldn’t happen in an Open: no sail numbers, different sail numbers on each side of a new sail, a family of Aero Sailors out with 3 sizes of sail all with the same sail number. We have signing on sheets with columns for ‘sail used today’ and ‘series sail number’ as in the real-world competitors change boats and have old sails for windy weather (And scorers have limited patience in sorting it out).