Sunday 17 March 2024

Help beta test new version of HalSail

HalSail is getting an update for 2024 with a fresher look, especially when viewed on a phone or tablet. It is nearly ready for release, but any feedback from users would be welcome before it goes live for everyone. There are no changes to the underlying structure of the app - how you set up your boat register, racing classes or schedule - just to the look and feel of some of the web pages.

Please log in at beta.HalSail.com, give it a try and send your feedback to support@HalSail.com

Sunday 25 February 2024

New Portsmouth Yardstick Numbers

The UK RYA has just released its PY numbers for 2024 and I updated the table of HalSail standard handicaps this morning.

If you want to update your PY racing classes to the latest numbers, log into HalSail and go to Boats > Standard handicaps. Click the button showing your PY classes and you will see a table of boats and their handicaps. Those that are not in agreement with the latest numbers will be shown in red. Either update them individually, or click the button to update them all at once.

Thursday 9 November 2023

Another Autumn Update

I have been busy responding to some of your requests. Here are another two features you asked for.

Scoring by helm, rather than by boat, is popular in clubs whose members swap boats during a series. It has been in HalSail for some time and appears as a button on public results pages. However the button can be confusing and it makes no sense unless there are guest helms specified for some of the results. So the button now only appears for those series with guest helms.

Race committees sometimes award redress to a boat that have been prevented from getting a result for some reason outside its control. Typical situations are if a boat is damaged in an incident that was not its fault, or if the crew had been asked to help organise a race rather than take part in it. To cover these situations there has always been a facility in HalSail to award redress in one of several ways which are specified in this FAQ. But in each case the boat is treated as a non-finisher. What if the boat does finish, but the race committee want to award it a number of points different from those applicable to the place it achieved? Up to now the only way was to score the boat DPI, but that implies a "Discretionary Penalty". The word penalty is not always appropriate, so there is now a new scoring abbreviation in HalSail called RDF - Redress given to a Finisher. You can award any number of points you like to a boat scored RDF and it will still take its place in the race as a finisher.

Country Flags


HalSail is used in many countries for international regattas and championships, so I have added a feature to show country flags alongside the sail number. The picture below shows what it looks like on a public results page.


It is controlled by a new series switch called "Show country flags in results". Set that switch and the flags will appear alongside any boat whose sail number begins with one of the national sail identifiers defined in racing Rules of Sailing Appendix G.

Monday 16 October 2023

Autumn Update

I have made three small improvements recently that you may find useful.

  • Races that have not been sailed yet shown in public results pages. When you display the results of series in which no races have been sailed, you used to get a simple message saying there are no results yet. Now you get a list of the races in the series with their start dates and times.
  • Download series results by helm. When you edit the results of a series and click the icon to download them to an Excel file, you get the option to score by helm. Previously you could only download results scored the usual way by boat.
  • Download series winners and runners up. Open the winners page from the Result Menu showing the winners and runners up of all the series in your account. Alternatively open it from within an individual event to get the winners and runners up in that event. An icon now appears top right to download them into a spreadsheet. Note that in order to avoid asking the server to calculate all the results again, the file is made by your browser directly from the information on the web page. Thus it is very quick, but it produces a csv file rather than an Excel file. You can, of course, open the csv file in Excel to format it as you wish.

Thursday 17 August 2023

CSV Bug

When I updated the website a couple of days ago I made a number of improvements to the way data is imported from Excel files. Unfortunately in the process I inadvertently removed the ability to import from csv files. Sorry about that.

It is fixed now so that you can import racing classes, boats, races and results from either Excel files or csv files.

Wednesday 16 August 2023

Mid-Season Update

 I have updated the HalSail website with a number of improvements.

  1. Scoring penalties are no longer limited to 20% when the result status is SCP, XPA or ZFP. You now specify the percentage penalty when you input the result, although the default continues to be 20%.
  2. There are improvements to the way data is loaded from Excel spreadsheets or csv files to make the process more robust. This applies to importing racing classes, uploading boats to the register, importing races to the schedule, or importing results.
  3. The default type of redress is now RDG2 - average of all races except DNC, which is the recommended option for boats that cannot take participate in a race because their crews are part of the race-management team. You can, of course, still specify any of the other options if you wish. This FAQ gives details.
  4. There are new options on the public links page to go straight to the latest results for each racing class. You might use these on your own website to provide bespoke links for each of your classes.

Help beta test new version of HalSail

HalSail is getting an update for 2024 with a fresher look, especially when viewed on a phone or tablet. It is nearly ready for release, but ...