About

Built for the people who make racing work.

The problem

Sail race scoring is a thankless, exacting job. At most clubs, it falls to a small panel of volunteers — sometimes just one person — who has spent years learning the quirks of a piece of Windows desktop software called Sailwave. Sailwave has served the sailing community well for a long time. It is also Windows-only, deliberately opaque to newcomers, and maintained by a single developer. Its long-term future is uncertain.

The consequences of this dependency are real. At Howth Yacht Club, a panel of roughly four volunteers handles all race scoring. At IODAI (the Irish Optimist class), a single scorer manages events with up to 200 competitors. In both cases, growing the volunteer base is difficult because of the learning curve. The consequences of losing an experienced scorer — through burnout, a change of circumstances, or simply unavailability on race day — are immediate and disruptive.

There are web-based alternatives emerging, but they share some of the same concerns: single-maintainer products with limited transparency and uneven coverage of the handicap systems that Irish clubs actually use.

The vision

Sail Scoring aims to be a web-based scoring application that is accessible, correct, and sustainable.

• Accessible: A scorer with basic sailing knowledge and a browser can set up and score an event without specialised training. The interface should guide rather than intimidate.
• Correct: Scoring must faithfully implement the Racing Rules of Sailing (RRS) Appendix A, handle the full range of handicap systems and result codes, and produce results that withstand scrutiny from competitors and protest committees.
• Sustainable: The project must be organised so that its long-term viability does not depend on any single individual.

The irreplaceable core

Finish recording is already being disrupted by GPS trackers and purpose-built mobile apps. Publishing and display are peripheral — results can be consumed by any number of tools. These parts can be replaced by external innovation.

The irreplaceable core is scoring itself. Given a series configuration, a list of competitors, and per-race finishes — assign scores, apply discards, and produce standings. This is the hard, rule-governed, trust-requiring part. It is the part that must be bullet-proof.

The long-term aspiration is for Sail Scoring's scoring engine to become the de-facto standard open implementation of sail racing scoring rules — the library that other tools reach for when they need to know whether a tie-break was applied correctly or how progressive handicap points compound across a series.

Who is behind it

Sail Scoring is built by Mark McLoughlin, a software engineer and member of Howth Yacht Club. It began as a personal project to scratch a real itch — watching experienced scorers struggle with tooling that should have been replaced a decade ago — and grew into something more serious.

The project is currently in stealth beta, being tested with a small number of clubs and class associations before any wider release.

Questions, feedback, or interest in being an early adopter: get in touch.