Here are a few points and my opinions about the software and start line calls
- SailViewer is a tool for providing feedback about racing or training. It was never intended to be used to determine the exact position within centimetres. The GPS data from the boats, based on my experience of a huge amount of training and racing, always puts boats in the right place relative to one another and not far from reality.
- the GPS position of the Atlas device is at the end of the path line shown. It is in the middle of the boat shape since I don’t know which class puts it where.
- The boat shape is of Etchells length (I set it up to be exactly 9.3m, unlike most other trackers). The boat shape is just a simple arbitrary generic boat shape, not the one of Etchells (probably a bit wider)
- The orientaion of the boats in the tracker are rotated by your COG. It is good enough to present all that the report needs. I could go with heading, but in 99% of time COG is better. The only time heading gets better is if boat is standing and drifting, not really that often. Also, on some logging hardware heading can be way off, especially if not calibrated or close to other electric devices. Vakaros devices are pretty reliable with their heading numbers.
- if you do 6 knots of speed, the boat is doing 3m/s. My tracker shows positions for each second and it might not be exact for this reason, too. I will reconsider adding smaller movements if the GPS frequency is higher (you have 2 per second). Clearly would not use it to determine where 12m/s kitefoiler was at the gun. As I know Vakaros can log up to 10HZ, but this is a huge overkill for anything that is not going with speed over 20 knots as far as reports or debrief is concerned.
- so to make things clear. It does not show your exact positions but it is not very far. So if I see boats shown as 4m behind scored BFD and boats shown 5 meters over not, I can almost certainly claim that there were some mistakes. Looking at the footage, it is clear that there were
- every race committee does mistakes. It is nothing new, and it will always happen. What race officers should do once realizing this is try to fix them in the best possible way. What is the best possible way to do it is up to Jury to decide. Getting reinstated after being over is lately almost mission impossible, with juries not doing it if not 100% sure.
- The Vakaros Racesense technology used, but not implemented, shows that already now it can make pretty good job of checking for the boats over. Nothing is perfect and human observation is still needed to keep everything under control. If about to use it, I would recommend to think about not letting go the start with too many boats over even if technology picks them all. The boats in front over the line can compromise the race of people starting behind. Also having 10 out of 15 boats OCS is not something that will make regatta better.
- The other option is just to give up U and Black flag and force the boats over to come back in line if OCS. In my opinion this would be pretty good option and would allow everyone to still score digits and not letters in the results sheet. However, if 10 out of 15 boats are over, calling everyone back would pretty much create a mess and I would go for general recall if more than certain number of boats are over.