The curious case of the silent beeps

Race officers that use HalSail on their phones or tablets while starting races appreciate the Countdown page that shows how long there is until the next signal. It says which flag has to be raised or lowered and what sound signal to make. There is a second-by-second countdown and beeps marking the last 10 seconds. Or there were beeps until recently, but then they mysteriously went silent.

It seems that over the last few months the publishers of the main browsers, Safari and Chrome, decided that no audio should be played by a website page until the user had made some physical interaction with the device, such as pressing a button. The Countdown page did not call for any interaction, so the beeps fell silent.

To cure the problem, we have added a new button at the top of the page labelled "Enable beeper". Once the Countdown page has loaded, the user needs to press that button. Just press it once, whereupon it will disappear so as not to clutter the screen. After that everything will work as before, including audible beeps. Don't forget to turn the sound volume up on your device.

Offline app no longer available

The original version of Hal was Hal's Race Results. This was an offline program that could be installed on a Windows computer from the Microsoft Store.

Hal's Race Results used old software technology dating from the year 2000. It has become very difficult to maintain, so we have been forced to discontinue it and remove it from the Microsoft Store.

The good news is that HalSail, the modern online version of Hal, can do everything that Hal's Race Results could do and more. You can take a file produced by Hal's Race Results and upload it to HalSail, whereupon all your data - including classes, schedule of races, boats and results - will be available online ready for use.

So if you are still using Hal's Race Results, now is the time to take out a subscription to HalSail.

New Portsmouth Yardstick Numbers

Two days ago the RYA published the Portsmouth Yardstick handicap numbers for 2025. They are now in HalSail and will be used as the default handicaps in PY racing classes.

But note that EXISTING HANDICAPS ARE NOT UPDATED AUTOMATICALLY. That is because many clubs use their own bespoke handicaps and would not appreciate them being overwritten by the new ones. 

However it is easy to do the update yourself. There are two ways of doing it.

• You can update all the numbers in one go from the Boats  > Tools > Standard handicaps menu item. That page gives you access to all the standard handicaps in the following schemes: PY, IRC, Small Catamaran Scheme (SCHRS), Australian Yardsticks and the base numbers for the National Handicaps for Cruisers scheme. To update all your PY numbers in one go, click the button on the right of the PY row. That will give you a list of all the boats in each PY class and their current handicaps. The ones that agree with the latest numbers will be in green and the ones that disagree will be in red. Click the button at the top of each column to update them and turn them all green.
• You can update the handicaps one at a time by going to the Boat-Class crosstab page. There you can see all the boats in each class, with those that agree with the new handicaps in green and those that disagree in red. Click each one individually and add a new handicap that will automatically default to the new value. 

Happy sailing in 2025. May the new numbers reduce the bar-room arguments about handicaps. Some hope!

PHRF Time on Distance

We are frequently asked by clubs in North America whether HalSail can do PHRF time-on-distance handicapping. Well the answer is YES. We have recently implemented the ToD version of  Performance Handicap Racing Fleet from US Sailing, in addition to the time-on-time version that we have always supported.

In PHRF ToD handicaps are specified in terms of the number of seconds a given boat is allowed per mile, relative to a scratch boat. So the higher the number, the slower the boat. The race organizer specifies the length of the course in nautical miles. Each boat's corrected time is calculated as its elapsed time minus its handicap times the course length.

In HalSail the course length is entered by the race officer when selecting a particular race, or in the case of a fixed course it can be specified when the series is set up.

Results are shown in the same way as other types of handicap races, with the seconds per mile allowance shown as each boat's handicap. The length of the course is shown in the race header, along with the race officer's name and the wind conditions.

Price Increase

The price of a subscription to HalSail has remained the same ever since it was launched in 2016. Since then our expenses have gone up substantially, so unfortunately an increase is  inevitable.

The price will be £100 per year for all clubs, except those in the European Union where the price will be €120, and those in the USA where it will be $130. These prices will be applied to subscriptions or free trials whose expiry date is on or after 1st March 2025.

If you need to check your expiry date, login as a club administrator and go to Admin / Settings. Your expiry date is displayed in the top-right panel.

One more thing

There is a new handicap-analysis button on the public results pages. Open the results of any handicap series and look at the right-hand side of the header panel for each individual race. Alongside the button to print the results, there is a button with a graph logo to show the way each boat performed against its handicap, such as 1% fast or 2% slow.

This is the same information as was always available using the  Analyse Handicaps tool to users that were logged in. Now anybody can see it.

Latest Updates

 I have made several improvements since the new version went live after Easter. You may be interested in the following.

• When viewing the overall results of a series on a small screen, such as a phone, the default is not to show a detailed table of the result of each boat in each race, but just to show the rank, sail number, boat details as in the series switches and net points in the series. Now there is a button to expand the display to show the full table just like on a full-size screen. That will inevitably involve some horizontal scrolling.
• If you are running back-to-back races and there are guest helms or crews, the system will remember the guest names from the previous race and suggest them for the next race. Also race officers can automatically preselect the competitors from the previous race on the same day.
• Tandem races now appear on the public calendar page. Users can click to see the results, just like base races.
• The default action has been changed when importing boats from a spreadsheet, Hal file or SailEvent. As before, users have the ability to change the action for each boat by means of drop-down lists on the preview page, but the preselected option varies.
  If the numerical sail number (what is written on the sail, excluding any letters) is not the same as that of any existing boat, the new-boat option is preselected.
  If there is a boat already in the boat register with this numerical sail number, there will be three options: ignore the new boat, update the existing boat, or add as a new boat. The preselected option will be as follows:
• If the complete sail number, including letters, of the boat being imported is the same as that of an existing boat, and they are of the same type, assume they are duplicates and preselect the ignore option.
• If the complete sail number of the boat being imported is the same as that of an existing boat, but the type of boat is different, preselect the new-boat option.
• If the complete sail number is different, albeit with the same numerical number, and the type of boat is the same, preselect the update option.
• If the complete sail number is different, albeit with the same numerical number, and the type of boat is different, preselect the new-boat option.