The photo above shows you our Scoring Team’s Process Crib Sheets. Note … taped to the desk (cleaners came every night), and angled in to the HMS Scorer position. We did a lot of preparation on “process” and we shall write about the importance of that in another article. There are three process sheets here:-

• end of heat backups
• end of race backups
• end of race results publishing

There is of course one missing.

Standard Redress processing.

It’s missing because none of the Team, including me, understood in advance quite how important the work around Standard Redress was going to be. It’s massive.

It’s best tackled not at the end of the penultimate day… but in every race as you go through the Championship.

Most of us had never seen fully Umpired racing before. Interesting experience.

When the Umpires deliberate, a possible outcome is that an aggrieved party – knocked to the back of the fleet perhaps – can be awarded a “Standard Redress”. It is widely acknowledged by the Umpires that the HMS Excel scoring system does not have support for Standard Redress. This type of redress includes future score averages in races after the redress was awarded. It will be a manual calculation for the Scorers to complete after the last race of the penultimate day (look up on google or IOMWorlds2026 Jury Notice 1 for the Worlds). Redress awards given on the final day can use the standard HMS Excel button for “RDGave”. HMS Excel calculates redress awards looking backwards only – not into the future.

In UK, where use of HMS Excel is the norm, as there is no tool for Standard Redress we have a tendency not to use it. At the IOM Nationals we processed one. I’d not seen one before.

To be honest, it’s a very manual and error prone calculation. Get your calculator out and try one.

At the Worlds, after three days the Umpires had awarded three standard redresses. Concerned about what this would mean for workload at the end of the penultimate day:-

• racing ends around 1830
• scoring completes and winds down about 1900
• 1-2 hours of standard redresses to calculate, check, check again and then apply to HMS Excel
• drive home (1-2 hours)
• eat main meal of the day
• go to bed
• get up at 5am and do it all over again

… so I emailed the Umpires to “alert them to Scorer’s concerns as to the viability” of averaging one Standard Redress per day.

In the next two days of racing the Umpires awarded another 7 Standard Redresses. So we had 11 in total, two of them with one competitor. I had brought my Casio calculator and a ruler just in case….

Essentially for 12% of the fleet, you pop them into a boutique scoring system of their own. We had to separately hand calculate special scores based on ALL heats to date, check the rounding to 0.05, remembering which scores to exclude. (a competitor with two awards is a trap!) Then you have to apply the WORSE/BETTER score test to each Redress … then decide whether to apply to or not …. then load the answers into HMS.

Then ….publish race results to competitors so they knew exactly where they stood going in for the final day.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll understand the Scorer’s alarm.

So what did we do??

In flight, we designed, built, tested and used our own Standard Redress tool in Excel on our fourth laptop. We kept it up to date as Umpire decisions arrived, and race by race. At this award rate, no alternative really.

https://drsailing.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/sailing-iom-worlds-standard-redress-tool-final-at-calculatin-at-1820hrs-22-may-2026-1.xlsx

You can download our Standard Redress tool here on this link.

You are welcome to use it. If you discover an error, honestly… don’t tell me.

Points to note:-

• every skipper with an award is tracked through the entire regatta, race by race
• when you get an award in race N, you have to dig out all the scores in Race(1-(N-1))
• watch out for the result exclusions
• a skipper can have more than one award (see CRO33) and you have to cope with that
• rounding needs to be watched
• BETTER/WORSE Test needs to be applied

There’s a lot of calculating in there and you will see for each competitor, we ran the BETTER/WORSE test manually.

Before you load these Redresses into HMS, you need to audit them carefully. There would be hell to pay if one of them was wrong – Race Team protested etc. So how to do that audit?? The Casio Calculator??

You will note in the spreadsheet that each awarded competitor was audited (checked) by AFleet. AFleet happily has a Standard Redress button and we used it to check the answers our new tool was producing. You will see them there coloured black. Only when everything agreed, did we release the calculations for processing. Did AFleet find an error in the spreadsheet?? Yes – one. It might otherwise have snuck through undetected. But we found it.

Thank heavens for Parallel Scoring, eh??

Funny side-story :

This was a feverish work session and the whole team was ultra-focussed on their own contribution. Intense, it was. We hammered through all the processing and safely got the correct double checked answers keyed back into HMS Excel. Then I said to the Afleet scorer, “OK that’s done. Let’s do the same on the AFleet results now.” My colleague looked at me blankly and replied, “No … I finished all that ages ago….”

It built a little tension into the Umpire-Scorer relationship, I can tell you. In a very kind gesture, the Umpires presented us with gin and fruit cake. They were OK guys after all !!!