Snipe Week 2026

“Snipe Week” has become a thing when we have the Snipe Nationals around the second week of June coupled with the Colonial Cup. This year, as in 2021 both events were held in Annapolis. Not quite a record turn out for both but close with 48 boats for Colonial Cup and 52 for Nationals and as a few people mentioned, perhaps the most competitive dinghy regatta of the year.

What was a little different about this week compared to the 2021 week (or 2025 for that matter) is we used the Vakaros Race Sense electronic starting system thanks to Augie Diaz lending us the Race Sense tablet and units that go on the marks. While I have sailed a number of times using the system in Miami and understand it well, I have never been on the administrative side. When we signed up to use it, I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but it was a good learning experience. This post is mostly about Race Sense and not so much about the sailing which was documented exceptionally by Lexi Pline thanks to grants from CBYRA and the SCIRA USA Perpetual Fund. A rehash of links to those reports are below.

I love these meta pictures. The end result of this is here.

One of the issues with using the Vakaros system at this point is needing to provide rental units for people who don’t have them. I purchased a used one last year so had my own and have a mounting system on my boat. But for people who have never used it and rented (or even bought their own) there was a fair bit of hand holding to get everyone sorted with the proper mounting. Fortunately Navo Marine Technologies, owned by Brazilian Snipe sailor Maru Urban, has an arrangement with Vakaros to provide rental units to events. We scheduled 20+ units to be shipped to us before the event and eventually he also sent some awesome Tacktick to Vakaros adaptors made by Mad Mounts. These made life much easier.

The chore of administration is making sure all units run the same firmware and are running the Snipe Class legal profile (only show heading, timer and OCS). We had to do this for all the rental units as well as make sure people had their personal units set up properly at registration which also included where the units were located on the boat and the respective bow offsets. The best advice we got from Augie Diaz was to get a savvy technical guy to run the system on the RC. Steve Podlich tapped Rob Emmet of P2 Marine, a former Snipe and Star sailor, to be our technical guy. This was a great move as he quickly got up to speed and ran the show very well. We spent an afternoon before Colonial Cup with all the rental units getting them configured and scanned into the Race Sense tablet and having everything ready for registration.

Configuring everything at Rob’s place.
Mad Mounts TackTick to Vakaros adapters.

In the recent past since we have been using Clubspot for registration, events like Colonial Cup don’t take much registration effort on the “day of” since virtually everything is done electronically beforehand (payment, SCIRA membership, skipper/crew details etc), except for the inevitable last minute sail number changes (grrrrr, don’t get me started on that). However, when using Race Sense we needed to have more of an old school registration desk to mange distribution of the rental units, check in for the personal owned units in addition to any other standard regatta stuff like swag and drink tickets. It’s not rocket science but is a bit more of an administrative burden and is detailed busy work at a very hectic time, especially when people show up that day without pre registering. The main lesson learned for us is to try and duplicate data a little as possible. For Colonial Cup we had sail numbers in 4 different places (Clubspot, Race Sense Tablet, Vakaros System spreadsheet, Registration spreadsheet) which caused sync problems. We learned and corrected the process for Nationals by having a master spreadsheet with internal references so sail numbers automatically propagated through all of the tabs. It went much smoother for Nationals.

One of the cool things about using Race Sense (besides not having to endure hours of general recalls, U flags and Black flags) is auto recording of finishes since we often had clumps of 5+ boats overlapped at the finish which would have been almost impossible to record accurately by hand. The system spits out a csv file of finishers which is given to the scorer. I imagine eventually there will be an import to Clubspot that sucks in the csv file eliminating any manual scoring. All of the position track data is uploaded to Vakaros’ cloud which allows all competitors to replay the races after the fact.

It is still early in the life of automated OCS systems and there are still outstanding questions around accuracy and cost, but in general it has been a very positive experience. Click Here to get out of the embedded player and go full screen.

OK now to the racing part.

For Colonial Cup, we had quite nice conditions although never really about about 12 knots. Having the Vakaros system allowed us to complete all seven races. I sailed pretty well – at least as well as I do in any big event – with a solid midfleet finish at 25/48 (Full Results). The regatta wrapup from Arthur Blodgett is on the fleet website.

The three days between Colonial Cup and Nationals were the usual hectic measurement and other administrative tasks and by the time sailing started on Thursday I was pretty toasted. And from there it only went downhill, exacerbated by the less than ideal, very tricky and very frustrating conditions. My finishes were 23, 32, 32, 38, 38, 41, 51 for the first three days. Clearly I was losing my grip to put it kindly. In the middle of the second race on Saturday I started to head in but Lisa convinced me it was bad sportsmanship, so we kept “racing” but I essentially mentally checked out for self preservation just going through the motions getting the 41 and 51. I didn’t stick around at the club very long choosing to head home, regroup my head and recharge my batteries alone (ie an introvert), and had a good night’s sleep for the last day. Fortunately we had terrific conditions on the last day for two races in a 12-15 knot southerly posting my two best races (25 and 15). As I commented on Facebook, this last day turned what felt like a Type 3 Fun event into a Type 1 Fun day and a Type 2 Fun event overall. That said, I’ve never been happier to have a regatta be over.

Links:

My only good start of the Nationals on the last race (31313).
Actually having a good race.
Lisa being happy that I was not a miserable jerk on the last day.
At the finish, note the Vakaros unit on the mark.
As frustrating as it was, I love my Snipe Family!