It’s common to sail in multiple races on a single day. It’s also common to hold races over a number of weekends. A Sailing Series is a group of ‘one or more races’, normally with a trophy or prize awarded at the end of the year. In our club we have a number of Sailing Series that run through the year.

A typical example is our ‘Spring Series’. This runs on 3 Sundays in the spring. On each Sunday we try and run 3 races. In total that is 9 races.

Creating a Sailing Series

Launch SailResults and press the ‘Start Here’ button to take you to the Series screen. Type in the box and press ‘Create’. Once the Sailing Series is created, click on it in the list and you will be able to enter Boats and Races for the Series!

So what if a boat doesn’t sail all 9 races?

Let’s be realistic! I often can’t make all the races in a Series and sometimes the club doesn’t always run all the races. The conditions may not be good enough or we just don’t have enough boats on the water to justify a race. So how do we score this? This is where you have to start to think about the scoring! Lets pose a question about our 9 races.

Helm A is really good! He is faster than Helm B in most of the races but Helm A only raced 5, Helm B raced 9.

Question: WHO WINS? Do we award the Series to Helm B because he turned up to more? Or do we award the Series to Helm A because he is a better sailor? Or do we just award to Helm B because he is better looking?

The answer to this question is ‘a bit of both’. We want to reward both the good sailor and also the tenacious sailor. We use something called a discard profile. What this means is that for each sailor we use the best N race results from the Sailing Series.

There were nine races sailed, we are going to pick the best 6 results for each sailor to calculate the results.

If you sailed under 6 races you’ll get penalised for not turning up to enough of the Series. Helm A needs to count 6 races and as he only sailed 5 so he’ll get a poor ranking for the missed race.

Helm B might actually win!

Take a look at Understanding and using a Discard Profile. This post gives more detail about how to apply a discard profile to the results.