Category Archives: IOM Worlds

Worlds …. Flagpoles…!!

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(Above : Half the IOM Worlds flag set)

You cannot really run a continental, global or world championship without country flags can you?

There’s the traditional Opening Ceremony for a start and I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of making the race marshalling areas look a bit more jolly!!

We had 28 countries in attendance. No matter how you look at it, just about any budget number that you have to multiply by 28 is going to end up being a four digit sum. If you take a minute to work it out, the income fees for 84 entrants comes to around £40,000GBP. So if you’re not resourceful, you could be looking at 5% of Championship income just to pay for the >*&+<& flags!

So what to do? You’re only like to use them the one occasion at your club….

For a start, where to get your collection of flags from? We used “The Flag Shop”in UK. We ordered pretty large flags, maybe 5’x3′, (see photo) for each country. They must have stocks of flags already made, but if you order all 28 at once it turned out to be quite low cost. I recall maybe £300-£400 for the set of 28. If the Championship WDN/Wait-list springs an extra country at the last moment the cost for one flag was a LOT higher.

TIP : grab an indelible pen and label them all upon arrival with country name and “TOP” …well in advance of your championship ceremony. It’s easy to cause offence by flying them upside down. The Union Jack is not the only flag with this characteristic.) NO human really stands a chance of remembering 28 flags by country name.

Your venue is unlikely to have a nice stock of flagpoles to accommodate 30 or so countries, so you might have a procurement problem. You need around 4m high poles, with block and lanyards … all times 30. Financially that’s a big part of your budget right there. If you can get a rigged 4m flagpole for £30 each I’d be amazed. Let’s say £1000 of poles. So what to do?

Our venue host is a 50 year old dinghy and keelboat club. You’d be amazed what broken masts and booms get dumped by club members as the decades sweep by. In fact, Datchet had the entire history of mast design and building right there hidden in the pile…. Selden/Proctor sections, carbon masts, tracks riveted on/inbuilt, laser two section masts … and an old wooden enterprise mast!!

I’m not going to kid you that it was a small amount of work, but saving £1000 of budget is a huge deal.

A couple of lovely people teased us that we got the flagpole lengths different each time (see photo above)…. but were generally delighted to see the recycled materials that the flagpoles were actually made from.

The work involved:

  • we had one day with around six or seven DRS volunteers sorting the old masts, stripping spreaders, hounds and various fittings from them. Our sailing sec, Hugh, is a demon with the angle grinder and cut around half of them to 4m (ish) lengths on day one. If they were topmasts, they usually had a masthead fixing we could re-utilise. Sounds a lot of man-hours, but honestly it was a ton of work.
  • On day two, Hugh-the-angle-grinder-king, cut the remainder to a length and ensured we had a top fixing of some sort …. and that from our sponsored flagpole halyard supplier they were all rigged with a hoist lines.
  • On day three it took three volunteers to fix 28 or 29 poles to the landlord’s railing uprights. It took two scaffold brackets per pole – we got around 60 from somewhere but I feel the cost was around £150 for a box of 60..

Saved a fortune.

Post championship, I was about to start quietly dropping the flags (what to do with those? Sell them to the next Worlds?) and taking the poles down maybe two per day…., then the Dinghy Club Manager said it all looked great and could maybe a continuing club asset – they host lots of school and junior events for example. Flags a nice feature there…

Good!!

To the Team running the 2027 Marblehead Worlds, if you want a set of country flags, do get in touch!!

A Small Piece of IOM Worlds Legacy : Advanced Radio Sailing Transmitter Manuals……!!

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A lot of you clearly know about our downloadable collection of beginner radio sailors’ transmitter manuals. There have been around 2000 downloads now – we have FlySky, Futaba, Spektrum and Radiomaster in there. By the way, the Radiomaster manual on this list is by far the most popular. Given that we estimate there are only 19,000 radio sailors in the world (says AI !!), we think that 2000 download number is pretty interesting.

During the build up to the IOM Worlds, some mind boggling GBR talent put its mind to work to see if advanced features could be found on transmitters that would give the competitors a little competitive edge. The idea became to make three different radio sailing transmitter websites (Radiomaster, Futaba, Spektrum) and charge readers a nominal amount to subscribe to generate some income for the IOM Worlds.

A good idea… but we just ran out of runway and had a thousand other pieces of prep to complete. So we never got around to the monetised subscription idea. We’ve still got the manuals websites though.

For the basic radio sailors’ transmitter manuals, the easiest way to find them is to find the list of “Categories” on this website and select “Transmitter Manuals”. Alternatively use the website’s “Search” bar.

As to the three ‘advanced radio sailing transmitter’ websites, they are now online and available for free. To find them, just click on “RADIOS” on the menu bar of this website and you should find the three of them available there.

IOM Worlds : Scoring, Backing Up Your Data….!

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(A4 sized iPad Pro receiving score sheets fromThe Finish Line. Note this means you automatically have backup images of all your heat score sheets as they come in. Safely stored in your WhatsApp group.)

You cannot get half way through the Worlds, then lose all your data.

It maybe will surprise the uninitiated path you maybe spend more time “backing up” than you do entering scores. It’s a big deal.

We held three levels of race data:-

1/ On USB sticks (double ended USB-C and USB2, so you can plug into just about anything), we had our Current Data. Keep this folder neatly filed inside subfolders as you go.

2/ On the hard disk of our HMS primary lap top, we held our first level of data backup.

3/ The hard disk would automatically back up (if MS Cloud was working!) into OneDrive. All scorers and Officers were authorised to access the cloud folders.

We had two times that we did backup processing.

1/ At the end of every heat (so about 3x an hour) we would backup the three device layers above, being very strict about naming conventions. (more on that later)

2/ At the end of every race, as A heat had been entered, we would send a set of backups out via email to all the scorers and Officers in case of a proper disaster.

Naming Conventions :-

As we had different scorers on data entry duty each session , it was important that we all used the same naming convention and backup routine. We used a great concept from Andrew Crocker who was the Scorer at Gladstone.

  • the current heart was always named “current heat” and not by its heat number.
  • as we saved the backup, it would be named “heat 3b” , for heat b race 3 for example –the same in all layers of storage.
  • for extra security against gremlins, we wanted to build in a fresh close/reopen of excel as we proceeded.

Were found the quickest most foolproof way for heat backups was

1/ While in “current heat” , hit the little purple diskette icon (“save”) at the top of the excel spreadsheet

2/ Select “save as” and change the name from. “current heat” to “backup heat Nx” eg 3a, as you go. Save in the USB, and then on the hard disk.

3/ At this point your live spreadsheet is called “backup R3d” for example. Not what you want, so CLOSE excel completely and then go and find “current Heat” and re-open it. You are now ready to score again with a hopefully fresh excel.

If it is the end of a race (end of heat A), do all that, then email via outlook your “backup heat Nx” file to a list of the scorers and Officers. Your disaster copy – that should be your “Get Out of Jail” card if everything blew up.