Ian,
At my club they use elapsed time for either a 3 race day or a five race day, with the stop watch being started at either the 1st class flag or when on station, which is usually about 1 minute before the first class flag, with at least 2 starts and often 3.
The process I use is to tell sailwave that it has a start time and a finish time.
The start time would then be for a 5 minute start sequence with the watch being started on the first flag, 00:05:00, 00:10:00, and 00:15:00, and for an on station start with a 3 minute sequence, 00:04:00, 00:07:00, and 00:10:00.
I have finish sheets printed out with a column for boat ID and a second column for time. The times could look something like 22:31 for the 1st finisher then 46, 52, 7, 9, 24:05. This would mean that the first boat finished in 22 minutes 31 seconds, 2nd 22 minutes 46 seconds, 3rd 22 minutes 52 seconds, 4th 22 minutes 57 seconds, 5th 22 minutes 59 seconds and 6th 24 minutes 5 seconds.
We use bow numbers to reduce the boat ID to 1 to 2 digits, and a space for the starter to record start times which I usually need to chase up after racing.
I have been experimenting with Keith Sykes’ Android app in the lab and think it could be very useful for your situation.
Regards JohnL.
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From: sailwave@yahoogroups.com [mailto:sailwave@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Friday, 13 July 2018 6:49 AM
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [sailwave] Staggered starts, with a single (elased time) timer for several fleets
I think my question may be very close to that in a recent thread, but I’m not sure I’ve seen an answer!
My Club runs a Regatta with two different Handicap classes. Each class has three races, and the two classes have their own start, separated by five minutes, on a common start / finish line. Typically, the race timing crew only run one timer and simply record each boat as it crosses the line.
In the past, we have published start times for each of the three races, those start times have been entered in Sailwave, and the finishing times have been recorded as clock time. That worked well enough, albeit with some grumbling about the number of digits to be entered for each result. We have the competitors for the two starts classified by Fleet, Handicap 1 and Handicap 2, then the two starts are set up for each race, with the competitors selected for each start by Fleet.
Now, however, the format has ! changed a bit. Insted of having fixed, published start times for each race, Races Two and Three are “asap after the end of the previous race”. The race committee are also now in the habit of recording elapsed times for results - fewer digits, less scope for error.
Last year, in entering the results, I had to manually subtract the five minutes from each competitor from the second start in each race. That process was tedious, and error-prone.
I can easily enough get the Race committee to record the start times, so they can be entered in “Edit Race” for each start, but is there any way to tell Sailwave that all the elapsed times come from a single timer, so the software can do the subtraction of the five minutes from the elapsed time for the second start in each race?
Any advice will be most gratefully received!
Ian Day
Hurst Castle Sailing Club