Head Race Timing

Preparations for Head of the River

It is the Vesta Veterans' Head of the River race today. The race is organised by the club (obviously!) rather than a race organisation, so it is a massive effort by the club to provide the timing volunteers. I hope they have a great day. Start is at 11:00.

Tomorrow is the main Head of the River race, transferred to Sunday for reasons explained here. The HoRR timing operation is considerably different from most other Head races:

• Finish timing is from the motor vessel Interceptor
• Start timing and Finish video are each from a bus
• Intermediate timing at Barnes and Hammersmith is done by tablets
• They use a mix of laptops, tablets and video timing, with the results managed by a large and expert team at Ranelagh Sailing Club

It is a big operation. My small role as a volunteer tomorrow is crew identification at the Finish. The problem with crew identification is trying to identify crews with no bow number, while at the same time a torrent of other crews are finishing. The bow numbers are not easy to see at any distance. The Finish at Putney is over 80 meters wide, so a crew finishing close to the line of moored boats at Putney is still quite a way from the timers on the MV on the other side.

I have a project with the Vet Fours Head to come up with a plan for more visible numbers. It is one of those problems that sounds simple, but gets harder as you think about it. If the numbers are too big, they break (Women's Head). If they are too small you can't read them (Vet Fours' Head). We use binoculars, of course, but this means that the Spotter needs to communicate with the timers, who can't read the number themselves.

So if anyone has any good theories about readable numbers, perhaps they could pass them on. Ideas I have considered:

• Copy the approach used for number plates or road signs. These are designed to be visible, using black on yellow or on sparkling white
• Some sort of fluorescent number
• A bar code

Really I'd like some sort of beacon on a boat that announces itself as it arrives in the vicinity of the line. Any ideas, anyone? if we could come up with a good solution it would make sense for all the Heads to share it. You enter a race and you get a beacon assigned to you.

 

Women's Head of the River 2015

All done. The Women's Eights Head of the River Race have a great volunteer group for timing. Last year we had real time results but they were not published till after the race. This year they were published in real time via a Googledocs spreadsheet. Twitter had lots of favourable comments.

I was on the Start team at Mortlake. The timing went well in spite of the cold. All our times went through in real time with no problems. The last Starter was at 11:09:58, and straight after the race we stopped at The Ship (purely for reasons of timing!) to check our timing sheets. There were no errors, so we confirmed with Mel and packed up.

WEHoRR have made a real occasion of the event now, with Prizegiving afterwards at Putney. The last Finisher was at 11:37:20 and Prizegiving was at 13:30.

Preparation for Women's Head

The Women's Eights Head of the River Race is coming up on Saturday 14th March. It's an early start, at 9:30 a.m., which means the timers need to start setting up from about 7:00. Mel Harbour is the Chief Timekeeper, and I am one of about twenty volunteers assisting.

It looks as though it will be a grey day. Cold with sunny intervals at first, then becoming slightly warmer but overcast, with rain in the afternoon. Not too bad for timekeeping.

We have spent the past two weeks setting up the GPRS modems and SIM cards, and checking equipment. For the Women's Head Mel uses a Primary and a Secondary Timy system, so we need the data to be sent to two different systems.

It is now the evening before. We are all set up and tested, so the next step is to set up tomorrow morning at Putney.