Blue Water Tracks

Grant Dunoon (ORCV Member) has spent considerable effort in creating a cost-effective tracker for the ORCV which provides a professional approach to encourage participation in the sport both from a safety and spectator perspective.

It is important that as competitors we repay that effort by making sure when we participate in a race that we add all the details that make the BlueWater Tracker a world-class tracking system.

So how do you do your bit

If you have some computer skills follow the procedure set out below   If not, please seek the assistance of one of your crew members to assist you. 

Tracker Profile Setup Guide

This guide steps you through setting up your Bluewater Tracks tracker profile for a race both as an individual and as a crew member.

Videos to Help with these Tasks:

Adding crew to a boat  Click Here

Adding a boat administrator Click Here

Adding crew details Click Here

Getting Access to Blue Water Tracks

The BueWater Tracks back-end system, where the profiles are maintained, is accessed through the following URL: https://portal.bluewatertracks.com/signin

When prompted, you enter your Username and Password to sign in. DO NOT create an account.

Your Username is the email address you specified when registering with TopYacht. Check your TopYacht profile if you can’t remember which one you used.

Signing in for the first time. You won’t have a password and need to create one. Click on Forgot your password? to initiate the lost password process and follow the prompts. This will send a password reset link to your email address. Use this to set a password. Please remember it or you will have to repeat the process next time.

All Crew Members (including skippers)

If you are unsure please see the videos above

Crew members should update their profiles with at least the following details:

• Under the Crew Details tab (on the blue bar near the top of the window), a Photo, First Name, Last Name, Phone (04xx xxx xxx), Gender (only two, I’m afraid), Country (you’ll get a flag!), Crew Role and a short Bio.
  
  
• Under the Social tab, please link your social media profile.

You may enter details of next of kin and other interested parties under the Contacts tab if you wish.

Ignore Documents as we don’t use them. Races is a record of your races (since we started using the system).

When complete, log out and close your browser.

Boat Owners

If you are unsure, please see the videos above. You can assign a crew member to assist you with these task by setting them as a boat administrator (see video above)

They must also update the profile of their boat with at least the following details from these tabs:

• Boat Details tab (blue bar again), Boat Photo, Boat Name, Sail Number, Design, Type (select from list), Length, Width, Draft, Units (meters!), Country (a flag will be shown), Skipper Name, Email Address (of the Skipper), Phone Number (04xx xxx xxx), DSC MMSI (if you have one) and a short Bio of the boat.
  
  
• “Crew” will list all the crew that have sailed on your boat. The crew for any particular race will often be a subset of these.
  
  
• Social is the list of social media sites the boat has a presence on, for example, Facebook, Twitter etc. Please add these links so that people can quickly follow your boat.

Documents as we don’t use this tab.

Handicaps is where you enter the measurement handicaps you will be using. Typically, these will be AMS, IRC or both. Don’t enter a PHS handicap.

When done, log out and close your browser. 

How to use BlueWaterTracks with navigation software

you need to add the URL's below the race name which you get from the public tracker page eg /2019-melbourne-to-stanley-race

CSV format with: 

https://api.bluewatertracks.com/csv/

URL's for Expedition,

https://api.bluewatertracks.com/expedition/

https://api.bluewatertracks.com/expedition/positions/

To get all the competitor's last position during the race you can enter the below URL in your browser to down load a GPX file. If you are using the Expedition software then you should use the “Blue Water Track” menu option in that software.


https://api.bluewatertracks.com/gpx/


This url will download just the last position for all the boats and will be the smallest file.


Adding a “/xx” where xx = the number of positions from the last one to also include. Eg:


https://api.bluewatertracks.com/gpx/


The “/8” on the end will include the last 8 positions of each boat in the downloaded file. The Osaka race will have the trackers set to send the position every 4 hours then if we get 8 positions for each boat then that would be 2 days worth of positions.


Most chart plotters and navigation software can read GPX. (Free navigation software: OpenCPN)


Be careful not to set this to a large number as it may take some time to download over satellite.