Hobbies and volunteering: sailing scores and a club website

I sail, I teach a free sailing class every year, and I am the commodore of our local yacht club. Volunteer work is real work with no staff.

Scoring a race

When different kinds of boats race each other, a fast catamaran and a small single-sail dinghy cannot be compared by the clock alone. Each boat type has a handicap number. You take the elapsed time, multiply by 100 and divide by the boat's number to get a corrected time. I explain the math in How to score a race when the boats don't match.

After a club race I gave Claude the elapsed times and boats. It looked up the handicap numbers, did the arithmetic and gave me standings.

Then I started reading from the paper score sheet and the corrections began:

One boat had been sailed by one person and not two, which changes its number.
One boat was a different model from the one I had typed.
One elapsed time was off by two minutes. That one was mine.

Each time, Claude recalculated and reissued the standings. One boat was not on the standard list at all, so it worked out a number from a different rating system and said clearly that this was derived, not official.

A flyer for sailing lessons

Claude redesigned the flyer for my summer sailing class over several rounds. Along the way one line changed that should not have: whether life jackets are provided. That is not a design detail. You bring your own. Proofread the facts, not just the layout.

Homework for the club website

Our club website is old. Before proposing anything to the board, I asked for research on what similar clubs do. The findings:

One software platform is used by most of our peer clubs.
The website and the member portal are one decision, not two.
Our best benefit is barely mentioned anywhere: members can visit dozens of other clubs.

When the old site blocked Claude from reading it, it did not ask for a password. It told me how to make my own copy of the site and upload that.

Where it falls short

It cannot see the score sheet. Every error it fixed was one I had typed. Check the inputs.

Try this yourself

A prompt like the one I used. Paste it into any AI chat and fill in the brackets.

I'm scoring a club sailboat race with the Portsmouth yardstick. Here are the boats, crew counts and elapsed times: [list].

Look up each boat's handicap number, tell me which number you used and where it came from, and give me corrected times and standings. If a boat isn't on the standard list, say so clearly.

Part of the series 27 ways I actually use AI. Claude drafted this post from the record of our work together.