ezTrap Yacht Club Course - Limited Fixed Marks and Legs

ezTrap support
1

This topic is a follow-on from comments made by Paul Jackson in ‘ezTrap suggestions following a test’.

  1. The Club course has been used for races that have different start and finish Marks/Pins. And, it has been used for several Ocean Races over long distances including the Marblehead (Boston to Halifax) and Route Halifax/St. Pierre (Canada to France).

If the Club Course consists entirely of Fixed Marks (i.e. no upwind start) then the Course Information and Mark Information tables can be pre-printed (e.g. PDF) and distributed (e.g. paper or digitally) to the competitors at any time. My local club has over 40-courses stored this way with 10-12 Fixed Marks, which can be used and reused in any sequence for up to 12-legs.

If you have an example of course(s) that exceed 12-Fixed Marks and/or 12-Legs, please let me know. The current limits of 12 Fixed Marks and 12 Legs for the Club course can be expanded with modest effort assuming there is a need.

BTW in researching this topic I found a minor bug – if you use an ‘x’ as the name of a Fixed Mark, it will not be displayed in the Course Information table. And, if you use anything other than an ‘F’ or ‘C’ in the Club Course table then the Mark and Leg information will not be displayed.

  1. I do not believe you can add a new sheet or save just one sheet (course) of ezTrap – the entire app and all courses are saved including all password security. Programmatically it would be relatively easy to create a new spreadsheet with just the current values as displayed or some consistent subset. Do you think there is a substantial need? What format would work best for all?

Thanks,
Ed Bottrell

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I ran the Welsh IRC championship this year, round fixed makes because of Covid. There was a choice of 22 marks. I think I looked at this program as a first choice but believed I could not use it. Eventually, I entered all the marks into my GPS set the courses having used the GPS to get the race length, to that wanted for the sailing time available… The program would have been much better and If there was a way of exporting course details to the competitors that would have been ideal.