A New SailEvent App for PROs

It’s championship time in the Northern Hemisphere. And where there’s a championship there’s usually a Principle Race Officer making sure the event goes well. 

Enter the SailEvent PRO App.

Positioned between the main SailEvent club app and the race team app, PRO provides a set of functions for management in the run up to and during an event: 

• Immediate access to the entry list and notice board.
• Pin items to the notice board.
• Publish Notices to Competitors.
• Review and modify sailing sessions.
• See what’s happening today in terms of who’s signed afloat and who’s ashore. (But only if you use eTally; if you rely on old-school rubber bands, sorry, can’t help you.)
• Set protest time limits.

The link to the app is in >Settings >Apps, help is in >Help and we’d really appreciate your feedback on this one. Do we have the mix of functionality right – anything missing, anything not needed, tweaks required? 

Looking forward to hearing from you. 

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.

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...

Digital Event Posters

You’ve got your open meeting organised, volunteers lined up, NoR and SIs thoroughly checked, band booked. Now all you need are competitors.

The traditional way to spread the word was via paper posters pinned to noticeboards. Who knew who reads them and how effective they were.

SailEvent digital posters are the digital alternative for quickly reaching a wide audience via links on club and class websites, in emails and texts, and through social media.

Simple to create, easily distributed and with the entry form and other key information only a click away. Here’s an example:

Words, colours and images are all customisable and there can be up to seven action buttons giving instant access to

• Entry form
• Entry list (always complete and up to date)
• Notice of Race
• Sailing Instructions
• Official Notice Board
• Results
• Any additional information

Set up is in the new Posters section on the Events page. 

A list of posters in date order is an event calendar. That’s the topic of our next blog post.

Kiosk – The Nuts and Bolts and Woodscrews

The challenge – how do you make an app on a tablet computer available to several hundred people daily without them breaking it, stealing it, powering it off, switching it to another app?

The solution – inexpensive hardware and software, and woodscrews.

The venue for Chichester Harbour Race Week with its near 400 competitors is Hayling Island Sailing Club. HISC, like many a club, has a traditional outdoor wooden notice board. Originally the official notice board, but now largely superseded by online equivalents, it is remains the home of paper signing sheets.

That was clearly the place for two tablets – one for each race group.

We used Lenovo Tab M10s – 10 inch tablets running Android 11: good quality, reasonably priced and, importantly, with plenty of battery power. We installed Kiosk Browser, a mobile device manager, to run the eTally Kiosk app in Chrome.  Kiosk Browser hides most (though not quite all) Chrome and Android functions from inquisitive tappers. We applied screen protectors – thin sheets of glass – to both devices.

Connectivity came via a MiFi device in a box in an adjacent indoor area which just happened to be the snack bar.

We screwed a pair of security wall mounts to the notice board adjacent to where the paper signing sheets go.

A tablet powered on, clamped in position and ready for customers.

(Reconstruction!)

We’d previously briefed all competitors by email. We sat back and waited.

They took to it like the proverbial ducks to water!

I don’t know who these two gentlemen are but thank you, you look the part.

Was it perfection all the way? Not quite!

The card taped to the top of each tablet not only tells people which to use but also prevents them pulling down the Android settings and causing havoc.

The tablets on/off button needed a couple of millimetres headroom under the security clamps. One enthusiastic tapper managed to slide a tablet up enough to power it off.

A more strict implementation of Kiosk Browser will fix both of those issues.

Finally, the call went out that neither tablet was working. On investigation this was because they weren’t connected to the internet. You remember that the connectivity came via the snack bar? It turned out that someone had, entirely innocently, placed a tray of Coke cans on top of the box of tricks. Problem soon resolved!

So overall, a great success. Lessons were learned, the main one being that eTally Kiosk is a valuable addition to the SailEvent safety portfolio.

Kiosk - in at the deep end!

With an entry list of nearly 400 in a wide variety of boats, an equally wide variety of abilities and in tidal waters, Chichester Harbour Race Week has to work hard on competitor safety.

Sailing Club Software provides IT support for the event and a big part of that is keeping track of who is on, and safely off, the water. Way back that meant manually comparing multiple paper signing sheets - slow and error-prone.

More recently we’ve used eTally by phone – a great improvement that enables the Safety Officer to wrap up so much more quickly. Nevertheless paper signing sheets were retained for the small minority who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take the technology route.

This year we introduced eTally Kiosk in the expectation it would prove an acceptable alternative for that minority. The paper sheets were still there and right next to them was Kiosk. (We’ll talk about the mechanics of that in the next post.)

When introducing new technology you can never tell whether it’s going to sink or swim. It’s was gratifying to discover that for Kiosk it was very much the latter! 

Competitors of all ages got the hang of it straight away and thought it was a great idea. 

The number of paper signers went from a diehard handful on day 1 to zero on the final day.

Post-event analysis showed that overall competitors were 60/40 in favour of eTally by phone. That was 70/30 at eTally afloat time shifting to almost exactly 50/50 for eTally ashore. You can see how that makes sense.

So a highly successful first outing for Kiosk and, most importantly, all competitors were accounted for, and the safety team stood down, in record time. Mission accomplished.

Introducing eTally Kiosk

In our previous post we looked at why tallying is an important factor for competitor safety, and how eTally by phone is a logical progression. Now we are introducing eTally Kiosk - a new way for competitors to sign afloat and ashore.

Think of Kiosk as a communal, shared version of eTally by phone, available on a tablet computer strategically positioned in your clubhouse.

Before racing, competitors walk up, identify themselves, say they are sailing, make way for the next person.

Once ashore, it’s the same but they can also declare whether they finished, or not.

Here’s the process in pictures

1:Identify  2:Confirm  3:eTally  4:Next person

Kiosk doesn’t replace eTally by phone, the two coexist and people can mix and match as suits them best.

It runs in any web browser and on any internet connected device but is targeted at touch-screen tablets. Chrome on a 10 inch Android tablet is a good bet.

Looking for an event to give Kiosk some serious beta testing, we decided on Chichester Harbour Race Week at Hayling Island. 400 competitors over a 5 day regatta should be tough enough!

And how did it go? Very well indeed. The competitors loved it and the kit was trouble free.

Or to be precise, very, very nearly trouble free! The gory, and amusing, details will be revealed in a subsequent post.

Meanwhile, Kiosk is available for you now. See the eTally Kiosk Help topic for how to use.

Tallying – Traditional Technology: Updated

 “I counted them out and I counted them all back in again.”

This famous quote from a Falklands War reporter sums up a simple technique that’s long been used to account for people, livestock, any items that depart and are expected to return.

To this day counting competitors is a mainstay of sailing event safety management: you know who has gone afloat and you know who has come back. If the two lists don’t match then search procedures kick in.

The familiar tally board works well when competitors are known, controlled and relatively few in number. When you have a long entry list and can’t be sure who is going to turn up, or you need them to declare whether, or not, they sailed the course, then signing sheets are the way to go. But then you have the problem of comparing scribbles!

SailEvent eTally replaces signing on paper with everyday technology – mobile phones. 

 

Then the clever thing is that SailEvent collates and compares, in real time, the lists of those who went sailing with those who have returned. Any discrepancy is immediately obvious.

These screenshots are from the SailEvent Race Team app taken during the ‘Admirals Cuppa’, an invitation event for illustration only!

Now apply the all important afloat but NOT ashore filter and where’s Rodney!?

Time to start looking for him.

In this blog post we’ve shown how SailEvent’s eTally feature brings today’s thinking to traditional tallying.

In our next post we introduce a new, connected alternative to eTally by phone.

‘Tis the Season to be Jolly

And here’s your invitation to participate in a jolly Christmas event organised by the North Pole Yacht Club. The Official Notice Board and entry form are at https://sailevent.net/noticeboard/r1

Not only is this a bit of festive fun and silliness it’s also an opportunity to showcase the new SailEvent Virtual Notice Board.

The advantages of notice boards on-line are pretty clear – available, adaptable, interactive, all the good things you expect from the web - and clubs and classes are beginning to construct them on their own sites. Now SailEvent provides a no-code solution that lets you quickly and easily design and create your own virtual notice board that’s just right for sailors. And there's no need to trouble your webmaster!

What’s on the board:

• Documents such as Notice of Race, Sailing Instructions and your own forms.

• Links to useful information on the web – directions to the venue, Racing Rules of Sailing, invitations to join WhatsApp groups – the opportunities are boundless.

• Notices to Competitors that are automatically published to entrants by text, email or push notification.

• Hot links to the entry form and results page.

• Customisable look and feel – create your own colour schemes and add images.

And that’s only version 1; there’s more to come. The boards will be available in the New Year but please do take look at this seasonal preview now and send us your comments and feedback. And enter the event – Santa needs you!

Expired SSL Certificates

Disclaimer: The SailEvent team knows precious little about Secure Socket Layers, encryption, Certificate Authorities and all that good stuff. To us SSL certificates are just gizmos that work to make the web a better place.

Except occasionally they don’t work as some SailEvent users have recently discovered. When they go to SailEvent, their browser tells them that the site is insecure because its SSL certificate has expired.

But it’s not actually SailEvent’s certificate that has expired. That’s valid until 31/12/2021 when it will automatically renew. The certificate that expired on 30th September is the one at the top of a chain and the one that says “all the certificates below me in the chain can be trusted”.

SailEvent’s certificate is issued by Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority and the world’s largest, providing certificates to over 265 million websites so we are in good company. In fact there are reports that users of the likes of Slack, Shopify and Fortinet among others have hit the same problem.

Of course Let’s Encrypt knew this certificate was going to expire so provided a new one that will be good for many years. Trouble is, instructions as to which chain to follow to reach the top-level certificate are hardcoded into software on people’s phones, tablets and computers. Updated instructions have been distributed for quite a while but people running on older software will still be following the old chain leading to the certificate which expired on Thursday.

At least that’s our understanding. There are more erudite explanations here:

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-september-2021/

https://scotthelme.co.uk/lets-encrypt-old-root-expiration/

So what to do? Unfortunately there are no practical steps, no setup changes, no software updates, that we can make. But we can offer this advice to anyone who is affected by this issue:

• Make sure you are running the most up to date version of the operating system and web browser that you can on your device. That’s always sound advice.

• If that doesn’t fix it, try a different browser. There’s a suggestion that Firefox is a good one.

• If all else fails you can still go to SailEvent by ignoring the warning but be aware that your connection will not be encrypted.

Please accept our apologies if you have been troubled by this unfortunate circumstance but do understand that it is not of our making. It may be that the situation will improve over time; if we hear anything we’ll let you know.

A Busy Summer

Sorry not to have posted for a while but the SailEvent team have been busy with, well, sailing.  And working on some sailing event-related stuff too.

Every August we are involved with Chichester Harbour Race Week. That’s a major dinghy regatta – this year there were nearly 400 entries. It's organised by Chichester Harbour Federation and based at Hayling Island SC with competitors not only from harbour clubs but also right across the country. Racing, in tidal but sheltered waters, is enjoyed by everyone from world champions to kids of all ages.

With so many people from so many places in a confined area and just as we were emerging from lockdown, the organisers sensibly opted for a cautious, safety-first policy to limit human-to-human contact.

All entries were online using an app developed by us a while back. You can see its successor in SailEvent today.

Previously a prototype of eTally was available as a (popular) alternative to signing on paper. This year eTally was the default with congregating to sign at noticeboards actively discouraged. And, though I say so myself, it worked really well! Not surprisingly, on day 1, a few needed a little guidance. But by day 2 just about everyone had got the hang of it proving yet again how readily people can adapt to new ways.

And of course the big winner when using eTally is competitor safety. With over 300 boats on the water, knowing immediately who they were and, more importantly, when they were safely ashore is hugely powerful. eTally allowed us to instantly identify the few who were unaccounted for, track them down (thankfully always successfully), give them a talking to, draw a sigh of relief and stand down the safety boats pronto.

Sparkling weather, top class race management, a really quick and slick results service, and a Caribbean steel band made for a truly great regatta. As one happy competitor said “It was amazing! Is there any better dinghy event in the world?” 

So why not try Race Week yourself next year? And if SailEvent can help you organise your own meetings, do sign up here or just get in touch. The contact form is to your right.

BT and Spam

We’ve noticed that BT has recently started erroneously identifying eTally prompts as spam. Here’s an example of what we see 

554 Message rejected on 2021/07/25 11:30:55 BST, policy (3.2.1.1) ID (60BE9DFF0837699E) - Your message looks like SPAM or has been reported as SPAM 

We are not alone! A search of the web reveals complaints like https://community.bt.com

Previously we’ve seen this affecting our DutyMan service. Weirdly it can be geographically localised with one or two clubs being hit and the rest fine. 

What to do? 

It is difficult for Sailing Club Software, as originators of the emails, to get BT to pay attention. We have tried but they are unhelpful and at best have taken several months to respond. 

BT customers may have more success. Try a complaint like “why are you not delivering perfectly valid emails to me?”. 

The conventional advice is for BT customers to add sailevent.net to their BT safe senders list. 

Or perhaps best of all, BT customers switch to a free email service such as Gmail as recommended by the BT community forum. 

From a club’s point of view there is unfortunately little you can do apart from alerting your membership to the issue. You might also consider offering SMS texts as an alternative to email. 

Sorry about this but I’m sure you understand that the problem is not of our making. 

Who else is sailing today?

Wouldn’t it be good to know before you leave home?

Well, thanks to a new feature in the eTally app you can find out.

Tap entry list to see a list of all those who are entered to sail. Those who have eTallied Yes are highlighted in green, Nos are red.

edit entry is the existing update button renamed to be more meaningful. Competitors can use it to make changes, such as a different crew or sail number, that apply to just this sailing session.

We’ve also added more declaration options for after racing.

The Race Officer’s decision is of course final but there are times when it is useful to have the competitor’s version of how things went.

I’m not going to get into the subtleties of DNC vs DNS and DNF vs RET but there is a comments box below!

Entry Forms for Open Meetings

It’s time for open meetings – a chance to see new faces, and old, and bring much-needed income to the club.

SailEvent is ready with a new online open meeting entry form. It collects the same information as the familiar club racing form plus more contact details, club name and emergency contact.

A quick look round entry forms on the web reveals, unsurprisingly, much variety in the questions they pose nevertheless we believe we have covered the essentials that most clubs need. But we are open to suggestions so please let us have your feedback. We can fine tune the existing form or even add variants.

However at this stage we are not going to cater for selling merchandise, providing menu choices or any of the other many and varied potential options! Instead SailEvent now also supports custom entry forms. Create them using your choice of online form builder and embed in your SailEvent online entry forms page.

Of course open meetings imply entry fees and SailEvent is ready to collect them via the slick and modern Stripe payment gateway. But when it comes to dealing with real money we need to tread carefully so we are not making this feature generally available just yet. First we want to work closely with a small number of clubs so that we can monitor the flow and make sure everything runs smoothly. If you’d like to be one of those clubs please contact us at support@sailevent.net.

Open Meeting entry forms are available now if you have a SailEvent Club plan. For Custom entry forms you need to subscribe to the Plus plan. More information is available via club app >Help.

Sailing with Smartphones

 

We all know that smartphones are remarkable devices that bring enormous benefits to their owners. And we know that the stuff they can do is increasing all the time. SailEvent is part of that trend bringing paperless, contactless technology to the sport of sailing.

But what we know less about is exactly how sailors interact with their phones during a sailing day. So we asked a representative sample via an online survey and this chart summarises what they told us.

If you happen to be a statistician you may question the validity and reliability of online surveys but these results look reasonable and tally with anecdotal evidence. 

The chart shows that a healthy majority have their phones with them during the important signing to go afloat phase. Half take them with them at least some of the times they are on the water.  Most reach for them soon after they hit dry land so they can complete that equally important sign ashore.

It would be good to see more phones afloat as the following true and cautionary tale illustrates.

One afternoon a few weeks ago in mid February, father, son and dog were kayaking up a muddy, tidal creek. They capsized. Dad and dog ended up on the mud. Son managed to get ashore, had his phone with him and dialled 999. The inshore lifeboat, Coastguard helicopter and mud rescue team all went to their aid.  The RNLI brought dad and dog safely ashore - happy ending.

There are lessons to be learnt from this incident and one of them is the importance of keeping your lines of communication open. If son had not had his phone it could have been a very different story. So there are valid reasons for having your phone with you at all times just in case the unexpected happens. The RNLI sells a handy waterproof bag.

And if you do take your phone with you while sailing it is easy to turn it into a GPS tracker* and register it with SailEvent. Then people can see where you are, on the race course or on the mud.

Sail safe.

 

*Just install the Traccar Client app. It’s free, light weight and available for both Android and iOS. More information.

 

 

DSRC Integration

Good news for aficionados of the Dinghy Sailing Race Control (DSRC) phone app – you can now transfer information from SailEvent to DSRC on the go.

A new download button in the SailEvent Race Team app extracts a list of entries complete with their ‘signed to go sailing’ status ready for DSRC to import.

Enable the integration on the >Settings >Integrations page of the SailEvent Club app.

Sailing Club Software policy is to work with all software providers who are open to cooperation. We believe that this is the way to deliver the best possible IT service to the sailing community.  The new DSRC integration is a good example of this policy in action as it joins the existing SailEvent integrations with HalSail and Sailwave.

DSRC website: DSRC(google.com)

An Update about Updates

Here at SailEvent we like feedback – it either confirms that we’ve got it right or gives us something to work on. We’re always up for a challenge!

One message that came over loud and clear from the initial release of SailEvent was that more opportunities for fine tuning entry lists were needed. For instance if someone entered online and spotted a typo there was no way to correct it short of contacting the person in charge. Or if an unknown boat turned up on the start line the race officer couldn’t add it to his list.

We set about addressing these issues and a while back made it possible for sailors to make changes at eTally time for that one sailing session. That covered things like a temporary change of sail number or crew. Now we have gone several steps further.

Top of the list is that sailors can now update, and even delete, their own entry forms. This is the place to correct typos and the like. You do it in the sailor’s SailEvent account on the new entries tab which lists all that sailor’s entry forms. Take a look here; you need just your email address to log in.

Next up is the Race Team app. You told us that race officers need to be able to add competitors on the day and now they can.

Finally race officers can make those same temporary updates of, say, sail number for a session on behalf of a competitor. Again this is in the Race Team app.

So now we have a lot of flexibility but there are times when more control is necessary. For instance you may not want to allow entry updates for a championship where the entry list is managed by the class association. Permissions, one for each of the four updating opportunities, provide that control on a per competition basis.  For example if you don’t want race officers to add competitors you can take away that permission. 

The key thing to remember is that all changes, whoever makes them, update the single definitive entry list in the cloud. Different aspects of SailEvent look at this information in different ways but it is all the same data meaning everyone has a consistent and unambiguous view. What’s more, updates take effect immediately so if a sailor corrects his sail number then that number appears right away in the entry list on the club website and in the race officer's list too.

So now it’s over to you – let’s have your next round of feedback! Either comment on this post or use the Contact Us form.

Tales of Two Sailing Clubs

Despite everything, UK clubs did manage to get some sailing in during 2020. We’ve compiled stories of how two very different clubs dealt with the challenges.

The first is Hayling Island Sailing Club. Big and bold on its own headland looking out over Chichester Harbour, HISC is used to hosting major championships as well as providing a busy programme for its several thousand members. Clearly the former couldn’t happen but you can read here about how SailEvent helped HISC run club racing.

Separated geographically from HISC by only a few miles of sea, Sea View Yacht Club on the Isle of Wight is a world apart in style. Its cosy club house in the heart of the community looks out over the Solent shipping lanes. But the sheltered water right in front of the club is busy in the summer months with club racing, most notably for the clinker-built Sea View One Designs. Read about how SVYC put on racing for this popular fleet here.

Two clubs, each with their own character and ambiance and their own ways of providing safe and enjoyable time on the water for their members. But both required planning and organisation and that’s where SailEvent came in.

Have a good read.

PS We are at the RYA virtual Dinghy Show, 27th-28th February, on the Restart Sailing stand. Do drop by to say hello. Free tickets are available from the RYA. Looking forward to seeing you there

End to End Race Management

SailEvent has teamed up with HalSail to provide contactless, paperless, seamless race management from entry form to results publication.

This is a typical sequence of events:

1. Competitors enter an event or series via a SailEvent online entry form.
2. The entry list is synched to HalSail. Boats that are not yet known to HalSail are automatically registered; entries are added to the appropriate HalSail series.
3. On race day competitors eTally in SailEvent to say they are sailing.
4. Those who are sailing are automatically preselected on the HalSail results entry page for rapid finish recording.
5. The race officer records finishers in HalSail as they cross the line.
6. HalSail calculates and publishes results on the web immediately.

SailEvent’s race team app and HalSail's online finish sheet mean that race officers have a complete and up to date picture at all times both on and off the water. The SailEvent and HalSail apps are in the cloud and phone-friendly for organisers, race officers and sailors alike.

SailEvent has a new >Settings >Integrations page with additional information and simple set up. If your club does not yet use HalSail the web site is https://www.halsail.com. Do take a look.

"The members won’t accept it.” Or will they?

 “It’s time for change” is a popular rallying cry among politicians as it goes down well with voters. I find this odd because mostly people don’t like change – they like what they know. And that’s why we hear from time to time when talking about eTally that “the members won’t accept it”. 

But in these different times many assumptions about what people will or will not accept have been shown to be mistaken. Just look at the enormous growth in online bookings, online shopping and, most interestingly, online meetings. Who would have thought just a few months ago how readily people would take to Zooming and WhatsApping. 

And so it is with eTally. When told this is the way it is going to be, sailors find that they can tap an app on their phones as easily, if not much more so, than signing a sheet of paper on a notice board. At least two clubs have reported 95% compliance. And the remaining 5%? The SailEvent Race Team app is the place to tick them off. 

Once you’ve got sailors eTallying then their club knows what’s happening. Everything from showing the race officer who to expect on the start line to reporting for NHS Test and Trace. 

We sailors are a conservative bunch, after all we rely on a means of propulsion which everyone else abandoned as soon as there was a viable alternative, but experience with eTally proves that even old-timers can adapt. And of course for the younger generation the phone is all.