Sailwave Experiences

We were responsible for scoring the ISAF Volvo World Youth Sailing Championships that were held in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, on the east coast of Canada. The purpose of this post is to provide an overview of our experiences and to make suggestions for Sailwave that we think would improve its capabilities for scoring events such as this. We hope that others might get some good ideas from our approach and that we might get some suggestions from other Sailwave users as to how we could do it better the next time.

Our goals were to have the results available on the web as quickly as possible once a race was completed while maintaining a high degree of accuracy. We feel that we were successful in accomplishing this and that Sailwave was a significant contribution to our success. The assistance that Colin provided by developing a Sailwave plug-in for the overall scoring (Volvo Trophy) was great!

The World Youth Championship consisted of six classes racing on three courses for a total of six racing days. Each class attempted to get in two races per day for a total of 12 races. To attempt to be as responsive as possible we based ourselves on a sailboat approximately equidistant from each of the courses and used a small motorboat to pick up the results as each race completed and bring them to the scoring boat. On the scoring boat we had two portable computers powered via inverters by a large ship’s battery. We used digital phones to connect the portable computers to the web.

Sailwave was used to enter the results into both computers independently. We then published the results and uploaded them to a private area of the web. One of the portables downloaded the published results generated by the other portable and used a “diff” program to compare the results with the ones that it had published. If they were identical we were fairly confident that the results had been entered correctly. If they were different we made any necessary corrections and repeated the process until they were the same. Once we were confident that the results were correct we notified the Regatta Office via a secure radio link and they printed the results from the web and posted them on the Official Notice board. We then moved the results to a public area of the web that made them available from the web site. This procedure worked very well and during the entire event there was only one time that we had to publish corrected results (this was the result of having the Sailwave tie-breaking parameters set to the wrong value).

Sailwave did a fantastic job of scoring the event and was easily able to handle any special requirements that came up. The only place where we found it a bit cumbersome was when publishing reports. This was the result of there being so many options when publishing. To illustrate the problem here is the process that we would go through as each race completed. This process involves creating both preliminary race results and an updated summary for the class.

  1. enter the race results

  2. click on the race header so the results are ordered by the latest race

  3. select “Results” from the “Publish” menu

  4. select “Preliminary Results” as the title

  5. deselect “Publish series summary”

  6. select “Just this race” and ensure that the race number is the correct one

  7. click “Next”

  8. ensure that the style is set correctly

  9. change the name of the html file to the correct name (according to our naming conventions)

  10. click “Publish”

  11. click on the points header so the results are ordered by total points

  12. select “Results” from the “Publish” menu

  13. select “Preliminary Summary Results” as the title

  14. select “Publish series summary”

  15. select “None” for “Race tables”

  16. click “Next”

  17. ensure that the style is set correctly

  18. change the name of the html file to the correct name (according to our naming conventions)

  19. click “Publish”

We didn’t seem to be very good at doing this process over and over again. In fact, most of the times when our reports from the two portables didn’t compare the problem was that one of the parameters was not set correctly! We very rarely made any mistakes entering the actual race results.

We are sure that other members of the Sailwave Group have run into this problem and would be interested to know how you handled it. Our thought was that if Sailwave had a concept of publish styles that included all of the current options then once the styles were set up all we would have to do is select either the “Preliminary Race Results” style or the “Preliminary Summary Results” style to publish the reports.

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks

The Volvo World Youth 2002 Scoring Team