Timing Clock – Dinghy Pursuit Races

We run a weekly Pursuit Race, currently holding up boards to indicate competitor start times – The time has come to make this easier for RO’s and look into a waterproof rechargeable clock for the back of the committee boat that can count up and competitors can see.

~~~~~

Rather than spending hours researching this, I bet someone has already looked at this, it needs to count up to say 30min, be a decent size for competitor visibility but not huge, be OK with being occasionally knocked in the drink, rechargeable battery powered and in an ideal world cost less than 500 quid – anything useful for normal sailing races would be a bonus.

Edited by Midge - 17 Nov 21 at 9:17am

Having boards or similar to announce start times is very common for pursuit races. With a longish pursuit race and a wide variety of classes some competitors in the last starts may not even have arrived at the club when the warning goes off!

We've got a computer system ties to a bank of four lights which I guess could be manipulated, we've only ever run one pursuit race at hythe and I missed it, so not sure wether the programme that comes with the system does it, but I do tend to agree with Grumpyfeline it kind of is your responsibility to set your own watch..

Something like this? http://www.kitst.co.uk/kitst-clocks.html They can be configured to count up from 0:00:00 if that is what you want. NB These are "weather resistant" but NOT waterproof.

Edited by GML - 17 Nov 21 at 1:39pm

The point that I should have made earlier is that the displayed numbers serve the purpose of class flags. In a conventional sequence you know where you are by the flag display. Your watch tells you what second the signal will happen, but the flags tell you which signal the next one will be. I suppose it would be feasible for a club to use numerical signal flags, and change the number every minute but the boards are easier for most folk. In our club SIs we don't mandate that the number display is accurately timed, just that its displayed from around 20secs before the matching start to about 10 secs after.