Running a race day

The gun is the "Start race" button, not the clock.

A race sits in one of four states: Scheduled, Live, Finished, Cancelled.

While a race is Scheduled, almost everything about it is still editable, and the course is live: the race follows whatever the club course says, so moving a mark in the course editor moves it for the race too.

The moment you press Start race, the app takes a permanent copy of the course ("freezes" it) and the race sails that copy for the rest of its life. From that point:

• The Edit button disappears. Name, date, start time, duration, course, visibility and entry mode can no longer be changed.
• Editing the club course no longer affects this race. That is deliberate: it stops a course edit silently rewriting a race already under way, and the results calculated from it.
• There is no way to un-start a race. Live can only become Finished or Cancelled.

So: settle the course, the start time and the fleet before you press Start, and press Start at the actual gun rather than early. Nearly every race-day problem below is easy before that button and hard after it.

Be aware of these before you are standing on the committee boat.

• No course change after the gun. No shorten course, no change of course. Signal on the water and enter finishes by hand.
• No un-start, no un-finish, no un-cancel. All three transitions are one-way.
• A cancelled race cannot be reused. A replacement race gets a new public link.
• Automatic finish detection watches the frozen finish line. If boats finish anywhere else, it will not fire and you should use Set finish.
• P and S in a buoy course string are an unconfirmed assumption. The code reads P4 as "leave mark 4 to port", the standard sailing instruction reading, but no club has confirmed it yet. If your sailing instructions use the opposite convention, check a buoy course on the map before you rely on it. Getting it backwards is invisible on screen and obvious on the water.
• A boat with no tracker races fine but never appears on the map. Check for the orange "No tracker" line under a boat name before the start.
• DNF cannot be set from the UI. Use Retire instead.
• Handicaps are stored, not scored. You can set one on an entry, and the results table shows a Corrected column against each boat, but nothing places on it: finishers are ordered by the position you set, falling back to finish time, and points are not calculated at all. The handicap belongs to the entry rather than the boat, so it would be retyped for every boat in every race and nothing carries forward, and Set handicap disappears once the race is Finished. If your club races on corrected time, score it off the water.
• Nothing lists which club trackers are already committed to another race. The Trackers tab shows serial, holder and last report, not race assignment.