Race plans

1 Where it lives, and who can do what

Open Boats. Each boat’s row ends with a set of links — Polar, Targets, Calibration, Sails, Race plans. Take the last one. That row is the only way in; there is no separate nav entry.

Any role can read a plan. Authoring one takes a member or above — deliberately a lower bar than the polar and the tuning targets beside it. Those describe the boat, and they are wrong if anybody edits them casually. A race plan describes an intention: it is the afterguard’s plan for one race, and the navigator holding it is very often a member rather than an org admin. A plan the navigator cannot save is a plan that lives in a notebook.

Race plans are not behind the paywall and not behind the Race Control add-on. Reading and writing next weekend’s plan needs neither a paid boat nor a licence seat, and browsing one at the dock does not consume the seat that says a boat is live.

2 Create the plan before you draw it

Give it a name and a type, and press Create and draw. The editor opens straight away, on an empty route. That is the normal path and not a shortcut: a plan is saved first and drawn afterwards, which is how anybody actually builds one.

Names are not unique, on purpose. Two plans called “Round Gotland 2026” are untidy rather than ambiguous, and duplicating a plan and changing one rounding side is how routes actually get built.

3 Draw the route

The editor is a map with a coastline and a list beside it. The map is where a waypoint is placed; the list is where it is stated. They are two views of one thing — drag a waypoint on the map and its position updates in the list as you move; type a position in the list and the dot moves.

• Click open water to add a waypoint at the end of the route.
• Drag a waypoint to move it. The route line follows your hand.
• Drag a row in the list to reorder the course, or use the ↑ and ↓ buttons on the row — same result, and the buttons work from the keyboard.
• × removes a waypoint.

Arrowheads on the route line show which way it is sailed. The order is the route: the waypoints are numbered in the list, and the numbers are what the boat follows, first to last, between the start and the finish.

Rounding side

The side is stated from the boat: Port means leave the mark to port. It is carried because a coastal course routinely allows either side of an island and the sailing instructions say which — and because the rounding side is what turns a position into a turn.

Gate is the third option, and it is stored rather than resolved. A gate is two marks and a waypoint is one, so a gate is two consecutive waypoints both marked Gate. Which end the boat takes is the navigator’s call on the water. Nothing here computes anything from it.

Passing radius

How close the boat has to come for the waypoint to count as passed. New waypoints start at 50 m, which suits a laid mark; a headland rounded half a mile off wants hundreds. It runs 5–5000 m — below 5 m the radius is inside the GPS noise and the boat would never reliably advance past it, and a waypoint five kilometres wide is a leg rather than a waypoint.

4 Exact positions, in the format the committee reads out

Every position on this page is degrees and decimal minutes — 50°42.474′ N — because that is what comes over the VHF and what a plotter shows. Each waypoint has three boxes per axis: whole degrees, decimal minutes, and the hemisphere. The line above them is the readout: check that against the sailing instructions, not what you typed.

Two things the boxes will refuse, and both refusals name the likely cause:

• Minutes and seconds. 51 19 and 51.19 are one keystroke apart and about 300 m apart on the water, so the minutes box takes decimal minutes only and says so rather than guessing.
• A swapped pair. A W in a latitude box is not a typo, it is the two axes the wrong way round, and the message says which box the letter belongs to.

The tablet uses digit rollers for the same job, because text fields are hard to hit on a wet deck. Ashore you have a keyboard, so here you type. The format is identical either way, which is the point: a position read off this screen dials into the tablet character for character.

5 The start area, and what it is not

Press Drop the start pin and click roughly where the race starts. It does two jobs: it opens the editor over the right water next time, and it gives the plan a venue on the boat’s list.

It is not a start line. The line is pinged from both ends on the water, on the day, and nothing is computed from this pin — no bias, no distance, no timing. A plan with no start area is completely ordinary; it just means nobody has said yet.

6 Exclusion zones — the water you must not enter

Some water is out of bounds before the gun goes: a traffic separation scheme, a mussel farm, a firing range, the corner of the bay the sailing instructions put off limits. An exclusion zone records that on the plan, so it travels with the course instead of living in somebody’s head.

A zone is a name and a list of corners. There are three ways to enter the corners and all three produce the same zone:

• Draw them on the map, corner by corner.
• Type them into the same three boxes per axis a waypoint uses.
• Paste a published list, one corner per line.

Draw when you can see the water you are excluding. Type or paste when the sailing instructions give you the corners as positions, which is how most of them arrive.

Draw it on the map

Press Draw exclusion zone and click the map to drop each corner. The outline follows your pointer as you go, so you can see the shape before you commit to it.

• Double-click drops the last corner and closes the zone.
• Enter, or the Finish zone button, closes it where it already is.
• Escape, or Cancel, throws the outline away and changes nothing.

You never click the first corner twice. The ring closes itself, from the last corner back to the first — three corners are a triangle, and the edge that shuts it is drawn for you.

Type the corners

Press Add zone from coordinates. It creates an empty zone and opens its corner list; no map click is involved. Edit corners on any zone row opens the same list, on a drawn zone as well as a typed one.

Each corner has the three boxes and the readout line described in section 4 — whole degrees, decimal minutes, hemisphere — and both refusals apply here too: the minutes box takes decimal minutes and not seconds, and a W in a latitude box is reported as two swapped axes.

• Add corner appends one. It copies the corner above it, so a rectangle takes a few digits of typing rather than four full positions. The first corner of an empty zone lands at the centre of the map as it is currently panned.
• × on a corner removes it.

A zone with fewer than three corners blocks the save. That is the state a zone you are still typing is in, so it is expected; the row says what is missing, and the plan saves once the zone has three corners or you remove it.

Paste a published list

Sailing instructions publish a zone as a list of positions. Open the zone’s corners, paste the list into Paste corners and press Apply. Apply replaces that zone’s corners with the list.

One corner per line, latitude first. Three formats are read:

Within those three, the box is not fussy:

• Hemisphere letters (N, S, E, W, before or after the numbers) or plain signs. Not both on one axis.
• Commas or spaces between the parts. The degree, minute and second marks are optional.
• Formats may be mixed down one list, a line at a time.
• Blank lines are skipped, and so is anything after # or //.
• A last corner that repeats the first is dropped. The zone closes itself, so keeping the repeat would spend one of the 64 corners on nothing.

Nothing is applied while one line fails. Lines that cannot be read are listed under the box with their line numbers, counted as they appear in the box, and Apply stays disabled until every line reads. Applying the readable half of a list would leave a shape nobody published, with the missing corners nowhere on screen.

The box refuses anything it would otherwise have to guess at: one hemisphere letter where there should be two, a line with no letters whose two halves are written with a different number of parts, a sign and a letter on the same axis, and a longitude letter in the latitude position — which is not a typo but the two axes the wrong way round.

The zone row

Each zone gets a row beside the waypoint list: a name, the number of corners, Edit corners, Redraw, and × to remove it. New zones are called Zone 1, Zone 2 and so on — type over that with what the chart or the sailing instructions call it, because a name is what makes one of five polygons findable on a wet morning.

Redraw is delete-and-trace-again with the name kept. It is what you want when a traced outline came out the wrong shape, and it is why individual corners are not draggable on the map. A corner that is wrong by a digit is fixed in the boxes instead.

The limits, and why they are where they are

The editor counts as you draw and stops you at the limit rather than letting the save fail, so you never meet either number as an error. A pasted list of more than 64 corners is refused the same way, with the line the 65th corner is on.

Nothing checks that a zone makes sense. An outline that crosses itself, two zones that overlap, or a zone drawn over one of your own waypoints are all stored exactly as you drew them. The shape is on the screen precisely so you can see a crossing and drag the corner — look at it before you save.

7 Safety margin — the water under the keel

The safety margin is how much water you want under the keel on top of the boat’s draft. Routing that avoids shallow water adds it to the draft: water counts as usable when the charted depth is at least the draft plus this margin. The boat’s draft is a fact about the hull and lives on the boat; the margin is a judgement about a course and a day, and lives here.

That split is the whole reason the field is on the plan. The same boat sails a deep Atlantic leg at 0.5 m and the Solent on a spring ebb at 2 m — how much water lets the crew sleep through a headland at night is not a property of the keel.

It runs 0–20 m. Past twenty the number has stopped being caution and become a mistake with a shape — a margin typed in centimetres, or the minimum depth you wanted typed into the box that asks what to add to the draft.

Empty and 0 are different answers, and the plan keeps them apart. 0 m says you have looked at the depths and want no cushion, which is a real choice offshore. Leaving the box empty says nobody has decided yet. The line under the field tells you which one the plan is currently holding.

8 Import the committee’s GPX

Race committees publish the course as a GPX file with the sailing instructions. Importing that beats retyping thirty waypoints, so drop it into Import GPX at the bottom of the editor.

The file is read in your browser and nothing is uploaded — what eventually leaves the machine is the plan you save, like any other edit. You get a preview before anything is applied:

• Pick what to take. A committee’s file often holds the course twice — once as a route and once as loose marks for plotters that cannot read a route. Routes are offered first, because a route is ordered and a bag of marks is not.
• Read the list. Every waypoint, in order, with its position in the same DDM the rest of the page uses.
• Read what the import cost. Points the file did not name are numbered WP1, WP2 in route order; names longer than 40 characters are cut; anything past the 200-waypoint limit is left out from the end. Each of those is stated before you press anything, with a count.
• Then apply — replacing the route, or adding to the end of one you already have.

Recorded tracks are not read. If the file holds one, the panel says so and skips it: a track is where a boat went, at a point per second, not a course to sail. If the file holds only a track, the import says that rather than “nothing found”.

GPX is the only format read here, and that is a decision rather than a gap. It is the interchange format committees actually publish, which is the reason to read a file at all.

9 Saving, and the clash

Nothing is written until you press Save plan. Typing in a field, dragging a waypoint and importing a file all change the plan on your screen and nothing else — the chip beside the button reads Unsaved changes until you save, and your browser will warn you if you try to leave with work outstanding.

This is deliberately unlike the tuning targets next door, which save themselves as you leave each cell. The difference is that a plan can be edited from two places at once — you ashore, the tactician on the tablet at the dock — and that is the ordinary case for this object, not the exotic one.

So when somebody else has saved the same plan since you opened it, your save does not go through and nothing is overwritten. You get a panel with two ways out and no third:

There is no merge, and there should not be. Two hand-drawn courses cannot be blended into a third that either navigator would recognise, and a platform that tried would be inventing geometry nobody drew. Somebody has to decide which plan stands. It is worth a word between the two of you before you press either button.

The tablet has the same clash and one more way out. A crew who saved the plan at sea and find it changed here get KEEP MINE, TAKE THEIRS and KEEP BOTH — the last saves theirs as a new plan called <name> (aboard <date>) and leaves yours standing. A boat two hundred miles out has a better reason than a desk does to keep both and sort it out at the dock, and their copy waits on the tablet, unsent and complete, until somebody chooses.

10 What the map is, and what it is not

The map under the route is OpenStreetMap data: a coastline good enough to place a waypoint half a mile off a headland by eye. It is not a chart. It carries no depths, no seamarks and no hazards, and the ship’s plotter remains the navigator’s authority — that line stays true of every chart layer we ever add.

For two countries you can put a real chart underneath it, which is the next section. Everywhere else, the coastline is what there is — and the sentence above stays true of every chart layer either way.

11 Official charts on the planner

Under the route toolbar there is a Chart switch with two settings: Off, which is where it starts, and Official raster. Turn it on and the planner draws official chart imagery beneath your course — depth areas, soundings, buoys, beacons, traffic schemes, the lot — with the route, the marks and your exclusion zones still on top of it. Your choice is remembered in that browser, so a navigator who works in one country turns it on once.

The switch is available to every role, including read-only ones. It changes what you see and never what the plan says.

Which countries, and on whose terms

Each source is asked only for its own water. Outside those two countries the layer draws nothing at all — that is the chart showing where its coverage ends, not a fault. The map underneath is unchanged either way.

NOAA says of its own chart service: “Not to be used for navigation.” That holds for everything on this page, and for the Norwegian charts beside it. This is a planning surface, these renderings are not a certified navigation system, and the ship’s plotter remains the navigator’s authority. Plan the course here; navigate it there.

The neighbours, and why they are missing

Sweden, Finland and Denmark are not on the list, and the reason is licensing rather than effort — which is worth saying plainly, because a gap and a refusal are different things.

• Sweden. Sjöfartsverket licenses its chart data by agreement rather than publishing it openly. We are pursuing that licence. We are not going to put a date on it here, because we do not have one.
• Finland. Traficom’s open hydrographic data is published for neither navigational nor commercial use — its own required wording says the material does not meet the requirements of an official nautical chart — and anything else is a separate agreement with Traficom. Both halves rule it out here.
• Denmark. Geodatastyrelsen licenses its chart data by agreement rather than publishing it openly, and the free derived products that do exist carry a no-navigation condition of their own.

In every one of those cases the map underneath is unaffected: the coastline you plan a Swedish or Finnish race on today is the same coastline you planned one on last week.

12 Deleting a plan

Delete on the row, with a confirmation. A plan owns nothing: what was actually sailed lives in the boat’s own record of the race, which references no plan and is never touched. Deleting one takes the plan and leaves every debrief exactly where it was.

A plan that is loaded on a boat right now is not protected either. The tablet is holding its own copy of the course, so deleting the plan ashore takes nothing away from the boat — it simply stops being offered the next time the tablet fetches the library.

13 Getting it to the boat

The tablet fetches the boat’s whole library in one read while it still has connectivity — at the dock, on marina wifi — and works from that cache at sea. Save the plan before you leave the wifi, and check on the tablet that it is there.

Loading a plan on the boat is what turns it into the live course, and the start never changes: every race starts on a pinged line with a gun, and the whole pre-start works exactly as it does for a windward/leeward race. See Race Control on the boat for the rest of the day.

The boat can change the plan too, with no signal. The tablet’s WAYPOINTS card edits the route, draws keep-out zones on the chart, sets the plan’s under-keel margin and keeps a navigator’s log — a separate box from the notes you write here, because the notes are the brief and the log is what somebody writes at 0300. Pressing SAVE TO PLAN out of range writes all of it to the tablet and sends it when there is a link, so what arrives here may be hours old and is never lost in the meantime. See Race Control on the boat.

Edits made aboard — a waypoint nudged, one skipped — change the live course and are recorded with the race. They do not quietly rewrite the plan. That is what keeps “what we planned” and “what we sailed” two different things you can compare afterwards, and it is why saving a changed course back to the plan is a deliberate act rather than something that happens by itself.