Ahoy Skippers!

The former J/30 Rhapsody owner created Crew Manager for his own boat & crew scheduling and is now making this available to others.

Bottom line: Subscribing to a Crew Manager site really simplifies coordinating your schedule and crew.

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Boat Website subscriptions with Crew Scheduling & Notifications



J/30 Owners who subscribe will automatically have the J/30 North American Championship scheduled on their calendar.

If you are like me, getting everything coordinated for the season with the boat schedule and lining up crew is a continual challenge. In the early days when I owned Rhapsody I started with a spreadsheet where I typed in the schedule then asked crew to indicate what races they were available. I sent emails every week to remind the crew who was racing and asked who could bring the beer. As time progressed, the tools used to do similar coordination advanced helping with automatic email notifications. Many of the good free websites that handled this disappeared, so I subscribed to Teamsnap. While it had most of the features needed, it was geared towards team sports such as softball and football and was not tailored to boat scheduling. I was paying about $90 per year for a service that did not meet my needs. I provided suggestions on what they could do to help make the product better for sailors, but there was no interest for them to upgrade for the smaller sailing market.

At the end of 2017 I pulled the plug on Teamsnap and decided to write my own program. Since Dave Erwin was kind enough early on to show me the workings of WordPress which is the basis for the J/30 Class website, I had some knowledge on how to create a website and setup things the way I wanted. I wrote additional custom software as a plugin to WordPress to provide additional features that sailors want. Crew Manager was created in time to support the 2018 season. I asked four friends who had boats if they would try it for a season, provide feedback, identify any bugs, and suggest improvements.

Crew Manager has features crew members will use throughout the sailing season. In a nutshell, a Crew Manager website provides a "Who, What, When, Where and Wear" schedule with automatic reminders. After an event, the results may be posted and crew members may submit comments, pictures and stories about the event.
  • Provides a calendar of events for the boat and crew. Additional pages contain links of interest, weather and winds
  • Events include boat location and time to be there and may specify "Uniform" (e.g. orange shirts). It also may include the regatta registration and fee payment status for an event.
  • Crew members set their availability to participate - this is displayed on the events.
  • Updating your availability anytime on the website sends an immediate email to the Skipper (no more surprises!)
  • The Skipper designates boat positions for available crew members and makes assignments by crew member (e.g. bring beer) - all these are displayed on the event
  • Additional information may be included such as weather forecast, tides & currents, links to race documents, etc.
  • Crew members receive a reminder email 36 hours (or time as as set by the Skipper) prior to events for which they are scheduled - all the event information is included
  • Crew members may view a roster with contact information for all crew members. This is only visible to crew members logged in.
  • The Skipper can enter results and a result link on an event - This is automatically emailed to the crew members scheduled on that event

Want to learn more? Full documentation is available on the Crew Manager Support Forum.

Check out these Crew Manager websites: