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Scoring is easy right? What could possibly go wrong?
Actually scoring really is easy when everything is running smoothly. The challenge for any Club is to know how to handle scoring affairs when something jumps off the rails. As it probably will.
Let’s set aside the morning during the Nationals that my car sunroof spontaneously exploded while driving and showered me with glass. Thankfully not on the highway at speed. However, at a Championship that you might run, just know how your team will cope with a member not arriving for any reason.
The Systems:-
We have mature, proven scoring platforms out there. At the Worlds, we had great (new) hardware in duplicate and triplicate.
This website contains other material about protecting your Club reputation from conventional hardware glitches. There will probably be some. Did we get one of those? Yes, we did.
We had Windows 10 and 11 systems in use. Our PRO had advised that his Windows10 system (goes out of support in 2026?) was very robust. Consequently we had our additional Windows10 system running on nice Dell hardware – nice until in the middle of scoring a heat, the battery gave out. Honestly, we had to run to find screwdrivers small enough from the K7 van. It was “back off” time for the Dell. The Team did a great job of sorting that out while HMS Excel scoring continued on the HP. In an hour, it was back on the air.
The team was far more concerned about software issues, and luckily our team had a Microsoft professional on board. We needed him!!
First off – let me say that I have used HMS Excel at every regatta and championship I have ever scored (3 years, including 3 Nationals and now the Worlds). I adore the product. I love the thing. It comes from an era which is probably the last time that I felt that I understood what was going on in the technology. I’m from the “life is a spreadsheet” generation.
Designed and written by some very gifted and talented people (Henry Farley et al), it’s really very clever and does the job. Used all across the UK, and in plenty of Clubs worldwide. It’s reasonable for us all to think it has been used so many times, is so stable, that it’s the way to go.
We have to remember though that when you press the button in our Excel spreadsheet, over 90% of the machine instructions that get executed are outside the spreadsheet. The executed instructions are mainly in Excel 365 and Windows 11. On our system, the operating system and Excel are updated by microsoft every 20 days or so. It’s actually a very dynamic environment – constantly changing. Not stable at all.
Good advice from the PRO was to have Windows 10, but that goes out of support soon. So we did what seemed natural – and had both. One laptop for each.
The general direction with Microsoft is that going forward if your application was not distributed through the MS App Store (read “fees and costs”), it could be unsafe. They don’t like VB macros or Active X code. HMS has loads of that. It’s what makes it special.
These days, if you buy a new family laptop with Windows 11 Home edition (we have an HP), it comes with Safe-Mode (“S-Mode”) already enabled. You need to switch it off to run HMS. It’s a one way process and no going back. You’ll think twice before doing it. Probably when we all see windows/12 come along, it’ll be even tighter. They don’t like VB and ActiveX. We reckon no family wants to do that switch off process with their household laptop. The general drift will have to be toward dedicated HMS laptops as the years wander by. No problem – but someone needs to think about that trajectory and how the sport best caters for it. Not impossible at all.
Graham Bantock has advised me a couple of times that if you get an HMS software problem, the first thing you notice is that people will tell you that it doesn’t happen on their system. Never a truer word. So how did we get on??
1/ Going back to 2025, we have had a few “white screen” moments on Windows/11. Everything locks up. To get passed it at first, we did complete system re-boots (2-3 minute delay?) which seemed to fix it. We now suspect that simply forcing Excel365 to quit and then restarting the spreadsheet is enough. At the Worlds, we built this close/reopen of Excel into our backup process (suggested originally by Andrew Crocker) at each heat completion. The problem didn’t come back.
2/ MS Cloud Failure :
At our Dress Rehearsal, the IOM Nationals, we had our first big challenge for our HMS Excel setup. We were running on Windows/11 and suddenly we couldn’t communicate. No email. Then we realised that MS OneDrive (MS Cloud) had gone down. It stayed down for 20 hours. Naturally, we thought it was something we had done, but after 20 hours it just popped back online again. . A minor impact was that our third level of data backup ceased working. …OK – no big deal…. The huge thing for us was that we were sending results to the event webmaster via email. So we could not get results to him. It seems that on Windows/11 and Excel/365, the Outlook mail server needs One Drive running as it seems to keep its contact folders (or something) in there. No Cloud, so email stops.
After two hours our Microsoft expert found the circumventions. (a) the problem did not occur on our hot standby laptop with its Windows/10 system – see PRO advice! (b) it was still possible to use the mail service via its own dedicated email website portal. Still – it was a fight to figure this out and STAY SCORING for a couple of hours.
3/ Visual Basic Error 1004
This was our big one. Life threatening stuff. My medications were at home!!
We had a wave of after-the-event Umpire decisions arrive to apply to the scores already in the system. Nothing complex and we had sixteen heats already inside HMS. How many results is that? It’s about 350 boat scores. We made the umpires’ alterations – nothing we haven’t done before many times and suddenly we got “Visual Basic Error 1004″… telling us to log in to VB. Multiple attempts to get past this point kept locking up with Error 1004 – but with varying messages.
If it had happened later in the regatta, maybe after five days, it would have been a “game over” moment.
HMS Excel, or any system, doesn’t get used often at the maximum 84 boats level. With this combination of Windows/11 and Excel365 we could quite possibly have been the first. Anyway – we were stuck at sixteen heats and simply nothing would go in. Properly stuck.
(As a team with four software guys in it, we had a feeling as to what the Error 104 was getting at. For sure, our theory will not turn out to be what it was, but we shall write about it later on this website.)
In a somewhat religious moment, I spotted Graham B right outside the Scoring Room door. Graham’s amazing and very, very calm… and a World authority on HMS. Honestly – It was like being knocked down by an ambulance.
Graham listened carefully to our problem description then simply said, “You need to speak to Lester”. We called Lester straight away. God surely does exist as Lester answered immediately.
Lester’s advice was that when Error 1004 starts, it never, ever, goes away. You have two choices – step back through the backups until you find one that works (takes time), or… bite the bullet and go right back to an empty spreadsheet and start all over again. Enter the Umpire decisions in the normal in the normal flow and not after the event. Enter those 350 results from the beginning.
That’s what we did. The Commodore stepped in to help me reload the entire regatta to date. The team carried on scoring into the Parallel System. It took around two hours to diagnose, re-enter and check – then catch up with real time.
Frankly – I thought I was going to die. Stress is hardly a good word.
That’s what we had a parallel system for, of course. We could switch across at any time and keep going. In the heat of the moment, we knew how all that was going to work. However, we had not thought out an approval process to permit the scorers to dump one of the scoring platforms and keep going on the other. Interesting.
At this moment, we still had around 4-5 days of Championship to go. So what did we do??
1/ We booted up all three Windows Laptops, full time.
2/ From this point on, we ran two full HMS Excel systems in parallel, plus the Afleet system. We named our laptops “HMS Primary” and “HMS Secondary” and carried out our documented process flow as normal. The team were fantastic.
3/ We permanently had our third Windows laptop switched on as our “lab rat”. If we had any late umpire decisions, or anything of that ilk, we separately tested each of them singly on the lab rat before applying them to the main systems. When we eventually came to apply all the (eleven) standard redress awards on the penultimate day, they were all tested one by one on the lab rat before applying to the two main systems. Takes time – but we survived. Processing the Standard Redress awards, checkingand testing them took at least two hours. There were complaints that we were slow getting results out. I could have murdered anybody who came in and tried that on me.
We did our Standard Redress modelling on a separate MacAir system.
Now : as you know we have been all out, all year, to be extremely even handed in our support and appreciation of the two fabulous scoring systems we elected to use at this Championship. All you HMS Excel fans will be wondering if our team could now list ALL of the problems we had scoring this 84 boat, 6 day event on our AFleet tablets. So here they are, listed chronologically:-
This photo above is a snapshot of the World Championship Scoring Office. The essential neat, orderly collection of filed paper documents are out of shot to the left. You’d be amazed just how important that is. I was. The amount of kit might surprise some of you.
Scoring a large Championship will be pretty simple, correct? What can we see here?
….Plan for every eventuality.
Our Worlds hardware configuration had to be cleared and locked away each night for security so all our kit had to be ‘compact’. If anyone walked off with the kit late at night, you’d have a grade A disaster on your hands. Kit lived on-site and was never taken home in a scorer’s car, for example.
Let’s start with the easy part first:-
Laptops.
We had four. Honestly we had long periods where all four were in use. More on why this was, later. We used a Macair dedicated for Standard Redress modelling, and three (!) for HMS Excel. Of the three Microsoft HMS laptops, two were Windows 11 with Office 365, one was Windows10 (our PRO reported very stable HMS performance on Windows 10. )
Printer: –
Let’s start with the final product first. Essential for the designated posting of Results is a printout on the Notice Board. We borrowed from Jim a simply beautiful piece of kit. For printing we used a battery driven, very compact, HP200 printer. It could run on mains or battery. Utterly brilliant kit. Must get one. You need to carry a supply of spare ink cartridges and tons of paper. The printer was essential to our result audit process too.
Just to illustrate the notion that if anything can go wrong, it will do so at the worst time….. At the IOM Nationals we ran out of black ink just as we were about to print the final results for distribution. Carry two sets of backup ink, if I were you. We had a conventional backup printer normally for the Race Control Van. If pushed, we could also print in the Clubhouse Admin Office. If you cannot print your results, it’s “game over”.
On the first scrutineering day at the Worlds, I arrived at the Club to find a regional power outage. No power. One in a thousand chance, right ?? Well, with our kit and battery printer, scoring could keep going in any event.
Tablets :
We had four Afleet tablets on site, our primary two were matching, ruggedised, waterproof etc. We also had our scoring coach with his Afleet tablet in New Zealand. We shall tell you later how we always had two tablets constantly on “live” with current data. We eventually figured that if the Clubhouse and all the kit was wiped out, the Championship could continue to be scored from New Zealand.
We used a brilliant A4 sized iPad Pro for electronic receipt of score sheets and umpire documentation from the Finish Line. It was flawless. If it had a failure at any point, it would take about 2-3 minutes for the paper documentation to arrive in the Scoring Office. We could also pick up the electronic copy of score sheets via the Afleet tablet if we had to.
We were making heavy use of WhatsApp and if it failed, we could switch to Signal for the same functions.
Storage :-
Our primary ‘disk’ storage was always USB sticks, not the hard disk…. so that in case of trouble we could jump straight to our hot standby laptop. We had three USB sticks – all double ended bearing both USB-C and USB2 connectors. They were very large GB too. We shall write more in a separate article about how data backups worked. We held all our data at three levels of storage.
Wifi Routers:-
We had two (eventually three when satellite arrived). Our main 4G Router (and the satellite router) was mains powered. Our backup 4G Router could run off mains or battery. In the photo foreground, that unit with two little ears sticking up was our primary 4G Router.
Power :-
We had enough chargers frankly to charge anything regardless of ports.
We had extension leads with power-surge protection.
In case of really long power outages, we had three 13amp battery power supplies on site and ready if we needed them. We could probably run for a couple of days on even just one of those.
We stayed in touch with the Race Course happenings by having a VHF Radio in the room tuned in to Race Team internal announcements.
Quite possibly you have tried Livestream style video coverage at your Club. We all enjoyed Gladstone, Croatia and several North American championships on YouTube. It’s early days but probably we’re all going to have to learn how to do it.
At the Datchet Worlds it was hugely important for us to get it right. Worldwide expectations were extremely high but more importantly the Press Coverage (Y&Y and Livestream by Evergreen) took up one third of the Championship budget. It was hugely important that it was “good”.
We took some risks, but how do you think it went? Nigel was keen to step up to the commentary role and spent six whole long days trying hard to make the video engaging to the wide audience. Immensely hard to do. He did brilliantly.
Nigel was of course getting loads of advice from all us experts everywhere – poor chap!! We’re all experts in watching sailing videos. Key advice though was to engage a larger audience by using skipper names, not simply sail numbers. Easy to say – hard to do when there’s 84 of them.
How??
Did you see how Nigel was doing it? Check any of the race videos and you’ll see that Nigel was constantly referring to a phone device in his left hand – scrolling with his left thumb – to get the skipper name (and result) information he needed.
If you click on this link using your phone, you will see what Nigel was seeing
Initially it was just to get Nigel (and Mark Jardine) the names and sail numbers to hand, but it was quickly obvious we could get them smack up to date results for each skipper too. How? We sent it from the Parallel Scoring systems. It was using a yet unannounced product called AFleet-Connect based on web servers in the US.
If you look through our workflow chart, after “Results Match?” you will see a box to the right in the Afleet column saying “Commentators Assistance Tool”.
That’s how we published it right there.
I was initially concerned after an incident at the Nationals with unapproved results getting out, that we might have a similar issue. You need one source of the truth in Results Publishing. But in the end, it was our brilliant new Parallel Scoring audit process that made it safe to issue. Absolutely every race completion saw us check every detail across HMS Excel and AFleet. It was only if we had precisely a 100% match, that I gave approval to the Team to release results. They went to the Official sources and Nigel/Mark’s handsets at the same time and the handset results were 100% identical to the HMS Results.
In the odd way of things, because the technology was so easy – we released the Commentators’ results from a tablet in New Zealand (our GlobalTeam!) and they reached the Commentary Team before the Scorers would have got their pins in the Clubhouse noticeboard …or before Austin popped the race results on to the website.
Update :
We have just deployed the same AFleet Connect technology at the DF65 Nationals at Barton’s Point. There the same feature was used to send results automatically (without webmaster intervention) to the East Kent Club website. Quite a few result updates were ‘sent’ from my kitchen many miles away !!!
Datchet Radio Sailing - Making It All Much Easier !! 