Tracked races and the fleet

A project can follow a tracked race. Attach it by pasting the race's link or key, and the project gains the organiser's own course geometry, the entry list, and — while the race is sailing — the fleet's positions on your chart, beside the routes you computed for it.

This is the land-based half of navigation practice: you plan the race, the fleet sails it, and you find out where your routing agreed with the boats that did well.

What attaching does

Fetches the race setup and mirrors it: the race, its entries, its divisions, its standings. The course comes across as a suggestion you can accept — it becomes a saved course in the project only when you say so, and never overwrites one you already have.

The organiser's own weather bounds come with it and can seed the project's archive window and race dates, wherever you have not set them yourself.

The rounding sides are a guess

A tracked course gives named waypoints and no rounding instructions, so every imported mark arrives as a starboard rounding and the import says so. Check them against the sailing instructions before you route — a mark rounded the wrong side is a plausible-looking route that is wrong from that leg onward.

The finish arrives as a point rather than a line for the same reason.

While the race is running

Positions are polled from the tracker and appended. Nothing is thrown away and nothing is overwritten: a fix is identified by its timestamp, so re-reading the race converges on the same history rather than duplicating it.

The chart draws each boat's latest position and a trail behind it, coloured as the tracker colours them, filterable by division.

Afterwards

The positions stay. Together with the project's retained weather and its run history, a finished race leaves a record you can go back through: what the forecast said, what you would have done, and what the fleet did instead.

Fair use

We poll a tracked race about as often as an open browser tab does, identify ourselves when we do, and back off when asked to. The data belongs to the organiser and their timing provider; this mirrors it for the crews already watching, and nothing here is a substitute for the official standings.