Season race calendar
Generate the complete programme and every default duty slot from templates.
Built for the person running the race
SailHQ for Race Officers
Set the season calendar once. Find your safety boat crew before the race officer cracks. Send the post-race results without chasing for entries.
Last updated 19 May 2026
A race programme that carries the admin
Turn up to the race, not the volunteer chase
SailHQ joins the season calendar, qualified duty pool, swap workflow, reminders, and live conditions so the OOD can focus on running the race.
Qualification gates
Keep safety boat and specialist roles with people who hold the right certificate.
Safety boat crewing
See which roles are filled, open, or awaiting a confirmed cover.
Swap requests
Let members arrange cover through a structured, approvable workflow.
Email reminders
Give every assigned member clear notice before the event.
Live weather
See wind, direction, gusts, and conditions next to race-day decisions.
Sunday, 8am
The race officer's morning, the way it usually goes
First gun is at eleven. The galley is already busy. The safety boat crew slot has one name in it and it should have two. You have ninety minutes to find a second crew before you have to start delaying the start sequence.
You scroll back through the WhatsApp group on your phone. Someone said they could maybe cover, then went quiet. You phone the club secretary. They are at home with a coffee and the same spreadsheet you are looking at, and neither of you can see who is actually qualified for the role. The list of Powerboat L2 holders is in a different document that the safety officer last updated in January.
A member walks past and asks if they can sign up for safety boat. You think they used to hold their ticket but you cannot remember if they renewed. You say yes because you need the body. Later it turns out their qualification expired in March and you have to walk it back in front of half the dinghy park.
By the time the first warning goes, you are already running on adrenaline and you have not opened the start sheet. The race itself is the easy bit. Everything that happens before the start sequence is what wears race officers down. Eight weeks ahead at the committee meeting, three races to staff, half the slots blank, and the same five names volunteering. Then it is sixteen weeks ahead, then the season opens, and you are suddenly the person whose Sunday morning depends on whether two volunteers turned up.
The job of running a race day is not the job of chasing volunteers. SailHQ is built so the chasing happens automatically and the race officer turns up to a confirmed crew sheet, every time.
The whole season, in one go
Set the season calendar once. Stop staring at next weekend.
Most race officers spend the year running a fortnight ahead. Series templates pull the whole season into view in a single afternoon.
The series template is the spine of the SailHQ calendar. Pick a name (Spring Sunday Series, Wednesday Evenings, Frostbite Series), pick the day of the week, pick the frequency, and tell SailHQ how many races run per event and what time each one starts. Add the duty types you need by default: Race Officer, Assistant Race Officer, Safety Boat, Safety Boat Crew, Galley, Results.
Hit generate. Twenty-six weeks of Sunday racing, every event already populated with the right duty slots, dropped onto the calendar. You can edit any individual event afterwards (skip the bank holiday, double up the Christmas Cracker), but the bulk of the work is done in one click.
The season-wide view is the bit race officers actually want. You see every race day for the whole year, where the gaps are, which weeks are fully crewed and which are not. The committee meeting changes from "what shall we do next month" to "here are the five gaps in the next quarter, who can take them".
Members see the same calendar in their portal. They can plan holidays around it. They can self-sign-up months ahead. The race officer is no longer the only person who knows what is happening in August.
Qualification gates
Who does what, gated by who is actually qualified
The "I do not have my Powerboat L2 anymore" conversation in the dinghy park is a system problem, not a member problem. Fix it once at the duty type level.
SailHQ ships with the duty types most clubs already use: Race Officer, Assistant Race Officer, Safety Boat, Safety Boat Crew, Galley, Results. Each is configurable, each has its own colour band on the calendar, and each carries the rules that govern who can claim it.
Safety Boat is gated on Powerboat L2 by default. Safety Boat Crew can be gated on First Aid if your club requires it, or left open. Race Officer can be gated on a custom qualification you define yourself, such as a club Race Officer Certificate or RYA Race Officer accreditation. Members without the qualification simply cannot self-sign-up for that slot. The portal blocks the button and tells them why.
Custom qualifications cover everything beyond the standard certificates: in-house assessments, club-specific competencies, sponsor or coach DBS records. Each qualification has an award date and an expiry date. Members see their own. Admins see everyone's, sorted by expiry, so renewals are chased before they lapse rather than discovered on race morning.
Each duty type also has a configurable point value and a self-signup toggle. Galley can be open self-signup. Race Officer can be admin-assigned only. Safety Boat can be self-signup but only for the qualified members. Same calendar, different rules per slot, no awkward conversations.
Swap requests
Swaps handled before Sunday morning, not on it
A member realises on Wednesday they cannot cover their safety boat slot. They open the SailHQ portal on their phone, find the duty, and create a swap request. They can target one specific qualified member ("Tom, can you cover this?") or open it to anyone qualified.
A targeted request goes to that one member's portal for accept or decline. An open request appears in a list any qualified member can pick up. The originator sees status updates without chasing the WhatsApp group. Once both members agree, the request lands in the admin queue for approval and the roster updates the moment it clears.
The race officer is no longer the unofficial mediator. The committee no longer has to track who said yes to whom in a chat thread. The duty roster is always current, and when you walk to the dinghy park on Sunday morning, the names on the slot are the names who turn up.
Race results
Race results: a note on scope
SailHQ does not currently calculate race scoring, handicap results, or season leaderboards. If you have landed here looking for a one-stop tool that runs duties and produces the Sunday afternoon results sheet, we are not yet that tool.
Race officers continue to use Sailwave, HalSail, or a club Excel sheet for scoring and publish results separately. Race results integration is on the SailHQ roadmap. Everything else on this page works today: the calendar, the duty rota, the qualifications, the swaps, the reminders, the weather widget. The scoring tool you already trust keeps doing what it does well.
Everything on this page is part of SailHQ. The duty rota is covered in depth on the duty management page. Series and event setup live on the series and events page. Weather has its own feature deep-dive. The pillar overview is at duty rota software.
Tool aside, the routine itself is worth getting right. See the full Officer of the Day checklist for a step-by-step run-down of the morning, the start sequence, and the post-race wrap-up.
For a handicap result, open the Portsmouth Yardstick Calculator. For an open meeting, start the public document in the Notice of Race Builder.
If you sit on the committee in another role too, the sibling pages for club secretaries, membership officers, commodores, and treasurers cover those angles.
Race day
What you get on race day
The morning of the race should be about the race, not about whether the boat has crew.
The dashboard shows live weather for the club location: wind speed, wind direction, gusts, and a wind classification (light, moderate, fresh, strong). The data is pulled from Open-Meteo, refreshed regularly, and visible to every logged-in member. You and the safety officer can sense-check the forecast before you brief.
Below the weather, the day's duty list. Confirmed names against every slot, the qualifications they hold, and any pending swaps that have been approved. No surprises. If somebody has cancelled inside the deadline, an admin has already overridden it and either reassigned or opened it for swap, and you can see the change before you head to the start hut.
The day stops being a hunt for missing crew and starts being a normal race brief. That is the whole point.
Common questions
Race officer questions
For anything else, see the full FAQ or drop us a line.
Each duty type can require one or more qualifications. Safety Boat is gated on Powerboat L2 by default. When a member tries to self-sign-up, SailHQ checks their qualification record. If the qualification is missing, expired, or the award date is in the future, the sign-up button is blocked. Custom qualifications such as a club Race Officer Certificate work the same way. Admins always retain a manual override for genuine edge cases, but the default rule prevents an unqualified member from claiming a slot they cannot legally cover.
The roster lives in the admin calendar view, with monthly and seasonal breakdowns of every event and duty slot. The portal is the source of truth, accessible on phones in the dinghy park as well as the clubhouse PC. For a printed wall copy, take a screenshot or print directly from the browser. A formal CSV export is on the roadmap.
Not at the moment. SailHQ does not currently calculate race scoring, handicap results, or season leaderboards. Race officers continue to use Sailwave, HalSail, or a club spreadsheet for scoring and publish results separately. Race results integration is on the SailHQ roadmap. The duty side, calendar, and crewing all work today regardless of which scoring tool the club uses.
Yes, if your committee gives you the duty management permission. Every duty type has a name, short name, icon, custom colour, point value, qualification requirements, self-signup toggle, and sort order. Add a Junior Race Officer slot, an extra Mark Layer, a Beach Master, or anything else your race format needs. Duty types can be archived rather than deleted so historical assignments stay intact.
The cancellation deadline is configurable per club. A common setting is forty-eight hours. Inside the deadline, the member cannot cancel themselves and the system points them at the swap flow instead. If a genuine emergency hits on race morning, an admin can override the rule, mark the duty cancelled, and either reassign manually or open it to qualified members. The roster updates immediately so the race officer is not left guessing.
Turn up to a confirmed crew sheet, every Sunday
Set the season once. Let the rota chase itself. Get back to running races.