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.