L over One is flying...

A well organised Official Notice Board makes life easier for both you and sailors. This article is about positioning documents on your SailEvent virtual ONB with particular attention to changes to sailing instructions. 

Let’s start with a quick recap on the board’s Information section. It can contain some or all of –

• Documents, such as the Notice of Race and Sailing Instructions, that are often, though not necessarily, drafted by the organisers.;
• Links to other web pages – perhaps a weather station, a Welcome video, an invite to join a WhatsApp chat. The opportunities are boundless.
• A set of hearings-related forms – protest form, request for redress, time limits, etc.

They are all listed sequentially on the board; each opened with just one tap or click. 

Getting that sequence right is key. Each item in the list has a Display Order – a single character 0-9 or A-Z. Items are listed in display order sequence (numbers before letters). If more than one item has the same display order, they are listed in alphabetical order within their display order. Blank display orders (the default) come last.

So what does this mean for your ONB?

You probably want the most important documents to appear first, that’s usually the Notice of Race and the Sailing Instructions, so give them display orders, say, 1 and 2 respectively. Or A and B, the choice is yours.

Next up, amendments to the SIs. We recommend that you publish them as documents in their own right, not as Notices to Competitors but see below.

Give them all display order 3 (or C) and then, and this is important, name them consistently with their number as part of their name. For example Amendment to SIs No. 1, Amendment to SIs No. 2 and so on, or Change to the Sailing Instructions 01, Change to the Sailing Instructions 02, etc. 

What we are aiming for is something like this

However, when you publish a change to the SIs, you need to inform the competitors. A good way to do that is to take the option of automatically issuing a Notice to Competitors. The notice appears on the ONB and competitors are informed by text or email. But you still need the hoot and the flags!

Hearings forms all have display order H  so they naturally appear in about the middle with plenty of room before and after, above and below, for your own stuff. 

It’s easy to adjust display orders and item names so experiment and juggle things around to get the best look. In your SailEvent club app, it’s >Notice Boards from the menu then the docs and links tab.

Protest!! Announcing SailEvent Hearing Management

Sailing is a self-policing sport and the long arm of the RRS law is the protest form. It’s often said that in club racing nobody reads the Sailing Instructions and nobody protests but, as you climb the ladder via open meetings and championships to the top, so the number of protests increases reaching, at times, dizzying heights.

But, at whatever level, sailors have the right to protest, or request redress, when they believe they have been wronged. The process starts with requesting a hearing and continues until a decision is published and, when warranted, scores are updated.

That’s where SailEvent Hearing Management comes in. It takes hearing requests through the flow from form submission, via initial vetting, scheduling hearings and notifying parties, to recording and publishing decisions. All online and all with the minimum hassle.

Starting with the Racing Rules of Sailing Part 5, Hearing Management adds Rule 42 and combines them with SailEvent data for maximum effectiveness. 

Here are just some of the features 

• Online protest and request for redress forms readily available on the virtual ONB.
• Initial vetting to filter out, for instance, results queries and invalid requests.
• Hearings scheduled to time and place, published on the ONB and all parties informed by text or email.
• Decision recording and publication.
• Scoring update checklist.

RRS Part 5 underwent a complete rewrite for the 2025-2028 edition. Its implementation in SailEvent has been thoroughly tested during 2025 with events up to European Championship level. However the Racing Rules of Sailing are always subject to interpretation in the light of experience and even personal preference. Consequently the SailEvent development team is open to all suggestions for improvement and fine tuning so, please, try this exciting new feature and let us have your feedback.

Kicking off 2026 with a new version of the Race Team app

Our first post of 2026 and there are exciting developments in store for SailEvent. We are kicking off with a new version of the Race Team app.

First a quick recap. As its name suggests, the app is an aid for Race Officers and their colleagues to use on the day. It tells them who to expect on the start line and whether they are safely ashore. The app can publish the course, keep track of patrol boats and manage the day in terms of times and races run. It works equally well on phones, tablets and computers.

The update includes minor changes such as rationalising the tab order and cosmetic improvements, but the major new features are:

Fleet Summary

The app now opens with counts of sailors by fleet so you can see straightaway how many to expect on the start line.

After racing, you can see at a glance if all are safely ashore.

 

Safety Check

It’s now even quicker to see exactly who, hopefully no one, is unaccounted for. Choose Safety from the Select (was Sort) drop-down.

Tap a name to bring up their details, most likely including their mobile. On a phone, tap their number to give them a call...

“Hello Jim, where are you? “

“Nearly home”

“ (inaudible) “

...and stand down the RIBs.

New eTally Icons

Feedback suggested they could be clearer so now we have

A round symbol means the sailor eTallied him or herself. Round = they go round the course? Square means marked off by the race team. I’ll leave you to devise with your own cue!

 

The new RT app is available now. Instructions for use are in app, get started via the >Help menu and, as soon as the Northern Hemisphere weather allows, please give it a go and let us have your feedback.

A Sailwave Hack for Christmas

That’s ‘hack’ in the sense of something ingenious, if unorthodox, that you do on your own computer to achieve some benign end, NOT a nefarious and malicious action by a baddie. 

And this benign hack doesn’t actually affect Sailwave itself. And it’s more for the Spring, when Northern Hemisphere sailing gets going, than Christmas. 

But otherwise there’s nothing wrong with that title at all. 

This story concerns the SailEvent Import App for Sailwave. The app runs on your computer alongside Sailwave and lets you load entry lists directly from SailEvent into a Sailwave series, then keep them synchronised, all without any intermediate files. It works well.

From the outset, the app was intended to run as a Sailwave plugin but, understanding that Sailwave could not implement that immediately, we provided a front-end to identify the target Sailwave file.

Nevertheless we contacted Mr Sailwave, who we know well, with a view to implementing it as a proper plugin. This is where we, or to be precise I your correspondent, shot ourselves in the corporate foot by pointing out that, as plugins are a fertile ground for Sailwave extensions, why not add identifiable apps  to the plugin menu automatically. Mr Sailwave agreed. It hasn’t happened yet so our app remains unplugged but it will do soon, won’t it, Jon?!

Meanwhile here’s the hack to add the SailEvent Import App as a Sailwave plugin. It revolves around replacing an existing plugin that you don’t use – let’s go for Send Competitors to RRS.org. Proceed as follows.

1. Install the latest version of the Import App from SailEvent’s >Set Up >Integrations page.

2. Locate SEImport.exe in your computer’s file system. This is not as easy as you might think! If a basic file search doesn’t find it, try this:

2.1 Open the Import App in Windows.

2.2 Open Windows Task Manager and find SE Import on its Processes tab.

2.3 Right click it and choose Open file location.

3. When you’ve found it, copy SEImport.exe and Newtonsoft.Json.dll into your Sailwave installation folder. That’s usually at C:\Program Files (x86)\Sailwave.

4. Now the hack – rename SWRRS.exe to, say, realswrrs.exe, then rename SEImport.exe to SWRRS.exe.

5. Open a new Sailwave series, select Send Competitors to RRS.org from the Plugins menu, and the Import App opens ready for you to connect the Sailwave series to its corresponding SailEvent event 

To remove the hack either undo the renaming or reinstall Sailwave.

   🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄   

Season’s greetings from the SailEvent team and we look forward to working with you in 2026.

What do you mean, it's not in class?

This post is a light-hearted rant about sailing’s lax terminology. 

Starting with “sailing”! Is it pottering or is it racing? For our purposes, it is that activity governed by the Racing Rules of Sailing excluding Appendices B, C, D and F. Obvious when you think about it!

More significantly, what’s a “class”? Is it a) a group of similar boats racing together, b) a type of boat such as a Solo or an Optimist, or c) an organisation representing a type of boat? All three are used from time to time. 

And what, in the sailing world, is the name for that which others might call a competition. Candidates include series, regatta, meeting, open, championship and so on; even just “racing” as in evening racing. Each  has its own subtle meaning but it would be helpful if there were one generic term that covers them all. Fortunately the RRS seems to have come to our aid. Prior to the 2020 edition it used the clumsy race or series. Subsequently it’s been (mostly) event even if an event happens to be a series! 

Does this lack of uniformity matter or is it all part of the charm and mystique of our idiosyncratic yet wonderful pastime? The trouble starts when computers get involved (always the way, I hear you say). Computers like to have the same name for the same kind of thing wherever it is used. Actually, with a bit of effort, this can be worked around – take Sailwave and its variable column headings. The major issue is with documentation – how to describe processing a class when class means different things to different people? 

SailEvent’s approach is to align, more or less, with Sailwave. So a class is a set of boats with the same design, either identical or conforming to a rule – Optimist, ILCA7, Fireball, J70. A fleet is a set of boats competing against each other, either all of the same class – a one-design fleet – or a mixture of classes – a handicap fleet.

When one or more fleets compete on one or more related occasions, SailEvent is with the RRS – that’s an event. It’s an event in HalSail too but a series in Sailwave. Ho hum.

Terminology is something of a hobbyhorse for the SailEvent team – we touch on it elsewhere - because we believe it’s important. Way back the RYA convened a meeting of sailing software developers and, among other things, asked us to address this very issue. It hasn’t happened! What do you think? There’s a comments box below...

New Competitor Fields

 We’ve added some handy new fields to competitor records. They are:

• Boat Name
• Nationality
• Gender
• Division

These fields can appear on entry forms, be exported and imported, synchronise with Sailwave via the Importer app, and be upload into Halsail.

Division is anything you want for populating the Sailwave Division column. For instance Gold/Silver/Bronze or Master/Grand Master/Legend.

To compliment the new fields, we have added to the portfolio of SailEvent built-in entry forms. You can now choose from:

• Dinghy Club
• Dinghy Open
• Dinghy Championship
• Cruiser Club 
• Cruiser Open
• Cruiser Championship

Select them on the event set-up page to preview.

Recognising that the built-in forms will not meet all requirements, the new fields are also fully supported by the Jotform integration and custom forms. 

If there are other commonly used competitor-related fields to be added, please let us know. 

Announcing GPS Resource Tracking

“Where’s that RIB gone?”, is a question many a race officer has asked themselves. Often a quick look round provides the answer but it can be less obvious with a big race area, multiple patrol boats and other craft, and maybe murky weather.

SailEvent Resource Tracking lets you see the latest reported GPS location of things on a chartlet on your phone, tablet or computer. 

A thing in this context is anything to which you can attach a GPS tracker. Typically that’s a RIB or committee boat but it could equally be a racing mark, a representative competitor or even the PRO!

GPS trackers can be dedicated devices, either rechargeable or wired in. Or more simply, a free app turns any phone into a very acceptable tracker.

Resource tracking is most likely to be of interest to larger clubs so unlimited use is available only with SailEvent Plus plans. But you can try it out with the Free (1 tracker) and Club (2) plans so why not give it a go. All you need to get started is that free phone app.

Full instructions are in Help. Let us know how you get on. The most innovative use gets a free round of applause.😀