It is some time since I have sent you a bulletin, because I have been busy organising events and, of course, sailing my own boat. But now the summer is nearly over, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, I have a bit of time and I thought I would cover a couple of things that I receive questions about very often.
One thing that seems to confuse people is giving redress. The most important thing to remember is that redress should always be given by allocating one of the five RDG status codes when you put in a boat's result. For instance if a boat is to be allocated redress of 10th place you should give it a status of RDG4 position10.
You most certainly should not put it in as a normal finisher in 10th equal position. That would have the unfortunate effect of downgrading the real 10th boat to 10th equal, with a score of 10.5 instead of 10, and pushing all subsequent boats down a place, so that the boat that finished 11th would find itself 12th.
What you must always do in redress cases is leave all the normal finishers untouched, and give one of the five RDG status codes to the boat getting redress.
As there are five ways that redress points can be calculated, I have produced a one-page guide that you can download from the web site. This includes a recommended answer to the frequently-asked question of how best to give points to a boat that is unable to take part in a race because its crew is doing race-officer duty, or driving the safety boat.
Another thing people often ask me about is the advisability of scoring races at sea on the committee boat. There are quite a few pros and cons to this which I have set out in a series of web pages about the best way to score an event.
In addition to the above, there are quite a few handy hints and tips in the frequently-asked questions part of the web site.
One of the things I always do in these bulletins is keep you up-to-date with any bugs that have come to light. I am happy to say that there has only been one minor bug since the last bulletin. It concerns a slight rounding error when calculating corrected times using average lap racing in tandem races. It does not affect real results at all, only the results of tandem races. It is described on the web site.
I have nearly completed work on a new version of HAL's Race Results. This is an entirely new program, although very similar in concept to the original, that will have a number of advantages. More details are on the web site. You will be able to download the program for beta testing from 15 November.
Happy sailing,
HAL's Race Results
Peter Hopford