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IOM Worlds : Parallel Scoring 4 – Planning Your Hardware Configurations for Any Disaster….!!

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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.

Protect your Club Reputation.

Plan for anything and everything.

IOM Worlds : Parallel Scoring – 1 …Why Even Bother..??!!

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At your Club, are you heading towards hosting a large Championship soon?

Obviously when you’re headed towards hosting a Worlds as we were, you start thinking about the BIG questions a year or two ahead. You’ll know already that Datchet tried to always have at least two ways to do any single job at the Worlds. Does this approach apply to Scoring?? … Hell, YES !

What are the really big questions to consider in Scoring? Well, for a start you have 84 people about to arrive who have spent a lot of money to come and race with you for a week. At the end of the week, or at the end of the Championship, regardless of the week they had, they ALL want to see their name on that Results Listing.

Yes – On that last day, 84 “experts” will all gaze at the beautiful printout that you have pinned to the Official Notice Board. They expect two things –

  • it’ll look smart and professional and their name was correctly spelled
  • It will have precisely ZERO errors on it. If they find an error at that point, especially in their own score, your name will be MUD. The subject of clean results, as it happens, is a whole new thing if you Parallel Score.

Reputation Protection – The Big Issue:-

Selfishly, for your Club you should be thinking of protecting the Club’s Reputation. It takes years to build up a reputation to be considered anywhere near “capable”. As we all know from 2025, you can destroy Club reputation in a flash. Reputation takes years to build and just minutes to destroy. If Scoring were the perceived failure point, it’ll take less than a few minutes to destroy. It’ll be talked about (with sniggers) in Club bars across the world for years.

Within Scoring, everyone will tell you “it’ll never go wrong”. …. “one in a thousand chance…” etc.

Don’t you believe it. What would you do to protect your Club Reputation?

In considering Parallel Scoring, we would consider it :-

  • for a 30 Boat Event? …. Probably, No
  • For a 45-55 Boat event? … Well maybe
  • For a 55-84 boat event?… Yes, for sure.

A simple way to think about it? If the scorer or scoring system fell over on the Penultimate Day, could the Championship recover by some other means – even paper scoring?? If you have already entered a couple of thousand boat results, just think what it means.

In 2024, we made the decision to score our various upcoming Championships into two separate scoring systems at once. We called the technique, “Parallel Scoring”.

Not simply having hot standby laptops and USB sticks…. but two systems at once.

Does this mean double the work? NO.

Are there surprising benefits? YES!!

Which two scoring systems? Everyone wants to know. Regardless of if you’re racing to HMS Rules or SHRS Rules, you should first think of what volunteer skills and platforms you can access locally. Start there.

At our Club we had people with knowledge of three scoring systems for heat based racing – the MYA’s HMS Excel, HMS on AFleet and HMS on Andrew Crocker’s brilliant Fleetboard. These are three really good scoring systems. We were spoilt for choice. We shall write more on the website later about why we chose what did …and probably it will not be for the reasons you expect. …Start with the volunteers you can get and the scoring skills that they have.

Consider the technology skills you might need too – I was keen to have a team member who is a Microsoft Professional for a living. How fantastic that turned out to be.

When you choose both your scoring systems, remember that if the two systems do not run on entirely separate technologies…. there is really no point.

When you later read our analysis of the things that can/did go wrong, you’ll fully appreciate the depth of the issue and separate tech.

We felt it natural to choose HMS Excel as our primary system and then Afleet as our Parallel System.

We decided with the PRO that unless we had a catastrophic situation, official results would simply always be from our primary platform – HMS Excel 2022.

IOM Worlds : The Importance of the Volunteers….!!

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I need to ask Jim to write us a piece on this, but I do have a few reflections of my own. Firstly and most obviously, an event like this takes a lot of volunteers to run it – and the Volunteers Team at Datchet was fantastic. Our Jim, was Officer in charge and I suspect it was pretty challenging.

Datchet Radio Sailing is not a large Club. Our members could never cover off the jobs on their own. We simply needed help from lots of Clubs all over the Country plus help from the very kind members of the local Dinghy and Keelboat Club, DWSC.

Big surprise for me was how many volunteers you need each day simply to make a Worlds happen. It’s not like a weekend Open Meeting, but a tad larger!

I had in my mind that there would be about three dozen on the daily Volunteer team. If you add in the seven umpires, that’s very close to what I paid the kitchen to deliver each day in terms of lunches.

Does 36 volunteers to run an 84 person event sound a lot to you? I suppose it does to me, but the first obvious thing to think through is that you need more people to step forward than even that number. If your Club has an event which is a week long, you have to allow for those still working for a living on weekdays. Most probably you need 40-50 names to cover three dozen roles every day of the week.

During the event, Jim was on Heat Board duty. The Volunteer Group had to manage themselves – arrange the rosters and get work done. To my delight, as I’d arrive around 8am each day, I’d find the volunteer leaders sitting in the upstairs lounge outside the Scoring Room arranging the duty rosters of the day…. keeping stress away from Jim ! Keeping the security gates staffed from 8am!! Keeping the bins empty and the porta-loos cleaned.

It’s hard too – people kindly offer their days but don’t always turn up. Anyway the Volunteerr leadership Group got it all to happen.

Scoring Considerations:-

In 2025, I Parallel Scored a 50 boat UK Nationals on my own. It was at another location (Bartons Point), which did not have the Venue Challenges which Datchet presents. What I’m about to describe to you is a bit of a step up from one person for the Worlds.

I can write about the Scoring Team specifically which could not have operated without a whole lot of volunteer hours. It was a good proportion of the volunteering overall. Two of us were from Datchet Radio Sailing. The other team volunteers stepped forward from the local keelboat fleet at DWSC (where I spent 25 years racing). Plus we had a brilliant Scoring Coach on the phone from New Zealand all day.

The first thing you need capacity to cover with Radio Sailors of a certain age… at the World Championship level,… is what happens to your Championship if one of them cannot make it to the Club on a day. It doesn’t have to be just illness or stomach bugs either.

Datchet is situated on one of the World’s most congested highway systems. We cannot assume the scorers (all commuting) would actually get through. You can’t expect to tell competitors, “Racing cannot start as the scorers are stuck in traffic” !! As we ran our Championship planning meetings on weekdays, it soon became apparent this was a real challenge. That and regular car mechanical issues etc. (also happened during our IOM Nationals Dress Rehearsal)

On any day, because of the layout of the Datchet venue we knew we needed at least three people on the scoring team. In fact, it would be a sweat at three. One scorer in the Clubhouse, one on the line and one transferring documents between the two, keeping the library of documents neatly filed and the results on the Official Noticeboard posted.

We ran like that at the UK IOM Nationals (a “dress rehearsal”) – it was hard. We needed to cover all days of the week, preferably with four people on site on any day. We ended up with five names on our list – not all present every day due to work commitments etc, but we got through the one week workload.

When the team is assembled for your event, if they are not all seasoned radio sailors they will need training in heat based racing and scoring systems. We ran three training workshops in advance of the championships.

A note too about our “coach on the phone” – by Worlds day two, we figured a workflow that simply pulled him into the team with a full time functioning role of QA partner – to check the Quality of simply everything. He helped us to get the cleanest and most accurate set of results ever presented, (we reckon!). Two thousand results in the system, all double checked and perfect. Inputs and output results were all 100% audited in two directions. Plus in between bursts of QA’ing, he was trying to get ahead of the Board Managers – attempting to see if there were any promo/relegate nasties out there as the Umpire judgements came through. …. It was a pretty protesty event.