Plan a race with your crew
Planning a race takes weeks and more than one person. This is the loop for doing that in one place rather than in a folder of screenshots.
You need Pro to start a project. Everyone you invite does not.
Start the project
From Projects, name the race and give it a start date if you know it. The date is only used for ordering and for defaulting the archive window later — you can change it or leave it empty.
Opening the project takes you into the ordinary workspace with the project attached. Everything works as it always did; what changes is that the workspace now remembers.
Draw the course once
Build the course in the editor as usual, then save it to the project under a name. From then on it loads with the project instead of being redrawn.
Four ways in, if hand-drawing is not the fastest:
- Import a GPX or KML file — a route exported from your chartplotter or another tool.
- Copy a preset — the classic distance races, with their real geometry.
- Attach a tracked race — brings the organiser's own course across; see tracked races.
- Save more than one. The official course and the variation somebody wants to argue about are both worth keeping.
Whatever the source, check the rounding sides. Imports cannot know them and say so.
Invite the crew
Invite by email from the project and choose a role. An editor can draw courses, add boats, run routes, and help operate the plan. A viewer can read the race plan and its history but cannot change them or route at the owner's limits.
Their own plan does not limit them inside your project — a co-navigator on the free tier gets the project's models and horizon while working on your race. See plan limits.
Add the boat
Set the boat up once — certificate or polar, draft, safety margin, manoeuvre penalties, wave comfort — then save it as a boat on the project. It comes back with those settings every time, and other editors can run with it.
They never see your polar. Adding the boat lets them compute with it, nothing more.
Run, and label what you are doing
Route as usual. Every run is filed: who ran it, which boat, which version of which course, and what came back.
When you are exploring rather than proposing, mark the run a what-if and give it a note — "six hours late", "if the front is slow". Later, the history reads as a record of what the crew considered rather than a pile of undifferentiated routes.
Nothing in that history can be edited, including by us. That is deliberate: a run is not corrected by a later one, and the ideas you rejected are the part worth keeping.
Working at the same time
Changes appear for everybody within a few seconds. There is no locking, and there is no merging.
If two of you save the same course, the second save is refused rather than blended, and you are shown the copy that won and asked whether to take it or keep yours. Half of one course and half of another is a course nobody drew.
Before the start
Two things the project can do that a one-off route cannot:
- Take the weather with you. Open the archive window and the project keeps its corridor weather as downloadable GRIB files. On the way to the boat, export a corridor GRIB for the chartplotter — see retained weather and GRIB downloads.
- Watch it happen. If the race is tracked, attach it and the fleet appears on the same chart as your routing, live, with the whole thing still there afterwards to go back through.
After the finish
Upload the boat's GPX track, or import it from the attached tracker. The frozen plan can then be compared with what the boat sailed, and the forecast can be checked against the weather sampled along that track. The race story keeps those results beside crew notes, images, and outside race reports. See Review a race after the finish.