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You may have heard that the Datchet Worlds’ general approach was to find two ways to do everything. In fact, if you could see two ways in operation it was probably because we couldn’t think of three!
It certainly applied to wifi and broadband provision for the site. Datchet Water is a private industrial location, storing one third of London’s Water, where day to day disruption can cause problems.
Our Championship was always going to be pretty dependent as regards online communications. If your Championship will be similar, where do you start??
Out on the Course:-
First off, out at the Race Courses and Finish Lines we have great signal strength on two of the three main national UK networks. We get good 5G too. You can look all this up in advance using provider online tools, then test it on your phones. What they don’t tell you about is network reliability.
As it happens, we know that the Datchet neighbourhood famously had a 4 hour outage in 2025 of its strongest network. Obviously, if that happened during Worlds Racing we would face a fair bit of calamity.
At the Race Control Van we had a Ryobi 5G system which seeks on the strongest available network. For the Race Team at the line, we would have enough capacity to keep going.
In the Clubhouse Scorers Office:-
A more complex situation…. You’d think that the normal Club Wifi would be fine, but history tells us that when the Clubhouse is full of visitors (we had maybe 150 on site on any day), the Clubhouse wifi has been known to hit a limit of 32 concurrent users. Did you know about that ?? Anyway, Club Management said, “Better get your own”.
(We also tested Wifi and Signal strengths in every room of the Clubhouse – amazing how it varied and in some rooms was zero. Don’t assume your clubhouse wifi reaches everywhere.)
For the IOM Nationals we ran using the Huawei 4G router (photo above) with two SIMS available in case of network failure.
What did we need this level of fallback for?
In scoring:-
our heat by heat backups were stored locally on USB sticks, but full race by race backups were transmitted via email, and also via the Microsoft OneDrive (cloud) system.
heat score sheets were arriving in the office via WhatsApp, plus we had our “Scoring Coach” full time on WhatsApp voice.
everyone wants online results, so those have to go out via the email transport to the website.
for both our scoring tablets, they have double onboard SIMs so they were covered… and we were exporting heat copies via AFleet EXPORT on the parallel scoring system.
You can’t have a Championship with no scoring results, can you?
Club Management were correct, of course !! Online performance was OK, but not blazingly fast. You do eat through the Gigabytes though. At the three day UK IOM Nationals we ate through about 20GB, so for the Worlds we bought second chunk of 45GB. (Not expensive but it lasts about 90 days)
That slight slowness, plus a 20 hour failure of MS OneDrive at the IOM Nationals made us extremely wary. (We shall write more about that later – but on Windows11, if you lose OneDrive, then you lose the email transport as well)
So from day two of the Worlds, we kept the Huawei switched on as backup, but moved across to a new satellite system – “Starlink” from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Simply amazingly good. Fast, stable and independent of mobile signal failures. The satellite dish was situated on the roof outside and the weatherproof cable led through the Scoring Office Window.
At the Worlds overall, the team in total were using a second Van based satellite Starlink for the Livestream video – plus a 5G service at the Worlds Website control van.
Apologies to Sven Forense (CRO 142) for using this photo ! Mind you, what a lovely paint Job on your VISS, Sven !! Fabulous contrasting fin-job!
We’ll look silly if this was taken by somebody other than Mark Jardine of Yachts&Yachting fame. Mark took many brilliant photos at the IOM Worlds and this one photo captures it all for me. Very low elevation, up very “close”, camera down at surface level almost, from the RIB I’d guess. brilliant action and depth of field. Our sport is very challenging to photograph well, but go looking for Mark’s IOM photos in the Worlds Website gallery. (www.iomworlds2026.com)
So just how did Mark take that photo? I had to ask him.
I was expecting to see some big Nikon with spectacular long zoom lens, maybe in some kind of waterproof case?
Not a bit of it. Mark reached into this pocket and pulled out one of these.
From 2024, Datchet Radio Sailing started experimenting with WhatsApp Groups as part of Open Meeting, Regatta and Championship Management.
Lots of Clubs will be doing the same, and if WhatsApp goes belly up, you can always switch to Signal or Telegraph. Use of WhatsApp Groups for Competitors, Race Teams, Umpire Groups will already be a regular feature at lots of Clubs Worldwide.
In 2025, at the DF95 Nationals, we also experimented with broadcasting AFLEET live results straight into a Competitor WhatsApp Group. … Amazingly popular that was! … If you are an AFLEET user simply select SHARE on the SCORE screen, pick WhatsApp and off you go. Simple.
Late in 2025, WhatsApp started offering post-beta versions of WhatsApp to support iPads. It transformed the way we scored the IOM Worlds.
The Championship courses at Datchet were three in number. The south and north courses at their furthest extremities (eg finish lines) were probably near 400 metres apart. The Clubhouse stands at the mid point. We had a third course, right in front of the Clubhouse. My normal preference hitherto was to score at the finish line and do all the work in our fabulous Race Control Van. However, at Championship result volumes – plus Umpire Paperwork, SYRPH, Standard Redress and all that – well, working in the confined space of the Race Control Van was never going to be practical. We decided instead to locate work at the Scoring Office in the Clubhouse Boardroom. What a good decision that was.
However, the time to hand carry heat score sheets back, sometimes 250 metres, (and up two flights of stairs, three times an hour!) to the Scoring Office was a challenge.
Our PRO had told us that trials of sending photos of score sheets by email had to be abandoned – email sometimes hits inexplicable delays.
The breakthrough was WhatsApp for iPads – and the use of (my family’s) ancient iPad Pro. That’s basically an A4 sized iPad. ….Amazing transformation in workflow for us.
For safety, security and backup, we would always immediately photograph the heat score sheet as it is handed over by the Board Manager. At the IOM Worlds, when we were handed the sheet the Line Scorer would photograph it straight into the WhatsApp Group and press ‘send’. Honestly, it was instantly popping up full size on the A4 iPad in the Scorers Office – and review, audit checking and data entry could start.
Generally, we were finished data entry by the time the physical score sheet arrived in the hands of our “Runner” ready to go neatly in the physical chronological file. Umpire sheets and protest forms came in the same way. The clarity of the score sheet on the iPad Pro was fantastic.
Amazing, … plus you get to keep the score sheet photo as backup.
Further Implications?
If you also publish results by WhatsApp or the soon-coming “Afleet Connect” , your Scoring Office doesn’t actually need to be on the Regatta site. Remote Scoring Support is now a possibility.
Why would you do that?
Scoring Capability and Skilled Volunteers might be a rare thing locally
Maybe a large proportion of your volunteer members live a long way away (like Datchet)
You might want one weekend to score two regattas at once, sharing skills
You might simply want access to a remote “Scoring Coach” to support the onsite team
At the IOM Worlds, we had a “global” team for Scoring. In addition to Datchet club members, we were supported by a World Class expert living in New Zealand. With WhatsApp voice support we used to dial him in at 0830 and he stayed on the line on WhatsApp conference mode all day. As it turned out, for workload sharing that was vital.
If you use AFleet at your Club, it is dead easy to send the small Afleet “Export” file into the Scorer WhatsApp Group any the end of each heat. Aside from automatically backing up your Afleet regatta versions per heat, the key advantage is that any remote Afleet tablets being used for the Regatta (eg Scoring Coach) will always be saying the same as the Afleet tablet at the finish line. We just ran this system at the UK DF65 Nationals for the remote Scoring Coach. Totally brilliant.. You should try it.
We cannot speak highly enough of WhatsApp in this environment. You need a good mobile signal (which we have out on the courses) , or good wifi in your building. You can read more that we have already written on WhatsApp for Radio Sailing at this link below:-
Datchet Radio Sailing - Making It All Much Easier !! 