Using Club Helm

Not joining a club that's already on the platform — starting a brand-new one? From the sign-in screen, choose Start your club (or go straight to /start on the platform's main address, not any one club's subdomain).

Want to join a club that's already on the platform? Go to that specific club's own web address with /join added (e.g. yourclub.clubhelm.online/join) — or follow the "Request to join" link on that club's own sign-in page. Fill in your name, email, and an optional message, then tap Request to join.

Sign in with your email and password from /login — either a specific club's own subdomain, or the platform's main address if you're not sure which club's address to use; email identifies you either way. Every password field has a small eye icon to reveal what you've typed before you submit.

If your email belongs to more than one club, signing in shows you a chooser instead of dropping you straight into one — unless you're already on the subdomain of one of your clubs, which is used as a shortcut.

Your dashboard is a set of boxes: your upcoming reservations (as skipper or as crew) and upcoming activities you're signed up for, current weather at your club's home location, upcoming club activities, how many open slots are on the fleet in the next 7 days, and — if you've skippered a race — your last race result and current series standing.

Open Reservations to see the fleet for a given day. Filter by date, sail duration, or minimum crew size from the filter bar at the top. Each boat renders as a day-timeline: a row of colored blocks for a boat with fixed time slots (e.g. Morning/Midday/Afternoon), or one continuous strip for a boat with an open calendar and no predefined blocks.

The My Reservations tab lists everything you're on, past and upcoming, as skipper or crew. The Rules tab explains your club's own reservation policies.

Instead of scanning the whole fleet grid yourself, toggle from Fleet grid to Find a match above the boats. Say whether you want to skipper, crew, or either, and roughly how many people you're sailing with — you get back a ranked list of the best-fitting open slots, boats needing a skipper, and reservations with open crew spots, each with a plain-language reason it matched (e.g. "2 crew members already waiting, no skipper yet"). Tapping a match opens the same booking or sign-up flow as tapping it in the grid.

Weather & Conditions in the sidebar shows current conditions and a 7-day forecast for your club's home location — temperature, wind speed and gusts, and general conditions. A compact version of the same forecast for whichever day you're currently browsing also shows right on the Reservations page, above the fleet.

Racing & Standings in the sidebar shows season, series, and regatta standings for every racing class your club runs, ranked by total points (lowest wins — standard low-point sailboat racing scoring). Pick a class tab if your club races more than one.

If you've skippered a race, your dashboard also shows a quick summary — your last race's result and where you currently stand in that race's series — with a link straight into the full standings.

On an open slot that already has a skipper, tap it to open the reservation and tap Join as crew — or Leave crew if you change your mind before the sail. If crew slots are already full, you're added to a waitlist instead of turned away outright.

Browse upcoming activities and tap one to sign up. If it's a potluck, add what you're bringing; if you're bringing anyone with you, set your guest count. If it's already full, you're placed on a waitlist and promoted automatically if a spot frees up — your guest count is counted too, not just a headcount, so you're only promoted into a slot that actually fits everyone with you.

My Billing shows your balance due and every invoice you've been issued. Pay now only becomes available once your club has connected its own Stripe account — until then, invoices are tracked here but payment happens outside the app, however your club currently handles it.

If your email is a member of more than one club, a club switcher appears in the sidebar — pick a club from the dropdown and tap Switch club to move your whole session there. Everything you see afterward — reservations, billing, and members/boats/season if you administer that club too — is scoped to whichever club you've switched into.

Only a member who's passed the skipper test can start a reservation from scratch. Tap an open slot and Book this slot. You'll set:

Changed your mind, or the sail's off? Open the reservation and tap Cancel reservation.

Open your reservation and tap Check out when you're heading out. If your club has a pre-sail checklist set up, work through it first — mark each item OK, or Flag issue with a quick note if something's actually wrong. A flagged item automatically opens a maintenance issue for that boat, so it doesn't just sit in a form nobody sees.

When you're back, open the reservation again and tap Check in — add condition notes if anything came up during the sail.

Some clubs let a member who isn't a skipper yet start filling a boat as crew before any skipper has claimed it — ask your admin whether your club has this turned on. If it does, an open slot shows a Start as crew option even if you're not a skipper. Any qualified skipper can Claim as skipper later, at which point it behaves exactly like a normal reservation from then on.

The Members page lists everyone in your club. Change someone's Status (Active/Suspended/Lapsed), Skipper flag, or membership Tier directly from the dropdowns in their row — it saves on its own a moment after you stop editing, no separate save button.

They get an email to set their own password. If that email already has an account on the platform, they're told to sign in with their existing password instead — nothing new is created for them.

Anyone who requested to join your club from its own /join page shows up in the collapsible Join requests section at the top of Members, with their name, email, and any message they left.

Only appears once your club has a membership cap set (see Season configuration) and has actually reached it. Lists everyone waiting, strictly first-come, first-served. When an existing member's status moves to Lapsed, the next person in line is automatically sent a real invite.

The Manage certification types section on Members lets you define which certifications your club accepts (e.g. US Sailing Basic Coastal Cruising, ASA 103) and whether each one counts toward the skipper-test prerequisite, toward spinnaker experience, both, or neither — a club might accept a US Sailing cert, an ASA cert, and its own internally-run "Spinnaker Certified" type side by side, all counting toward the same requirement.

From an individual member's own detail page (tap their name from the roster), log a certification they hold, or record a skipper test attempt. Written and practical results are tracked — and retaken — independently; a member only needs to redo the half they failed. Passing both flips them to Skipper.

The Boats page lists your fleet. Add boat asks for a name, class (e.g. "J105," "Sonar"), capacity, home dock, default max crew, and an availability mode.

Toggle a boat's Maintenance status to Out of Service to block new reservations against it until you switch it back — separate from the Active checkbox, which hides a boat from the fleet grid entirely (a boat in winter storage, say).

For conditions that ground the whole fleet at once — lightning, a named storm — rather than one boat at a time. From Reservations, tap Ground the fleet, give a reason, and confirm. Every boat that isn't already individually Out of Service immediately shows as Grounded and stops accepting new bookings, on the grid and in Find a match alike. Existing reservations aren't cancelled — sailors can still claim or join ones made before the grounding.

Lift it the same way, with Lift grounding on the same banner, once conditions clear. There's no auto-expiry — a grounding stays in effect until an admin explicitly lifts it.

From Boats & Maintenance, Manage pre-sail checklist sets the items every skipper works through at check-out (PFDs on board, fuel level, whatever your club actually checks) — add or remove items any time.

Maintenance issues lists everything currently open: issues a skipper flagged during check-out, and anything reported directly with + Report an issue (any member can do this, not just admins). Each shows the boat, severity, description, and who reported it — tap Resolve once it's dealt with.

Club-wide settings that shape dues, the skipper path, and fleet safety:

From Reservations (this form only appears if your admin account has this permission), block-reserve a boat for a whole season on a recurring or fixed-date-range basis, with a skipper you assign — e.g. "every Wednesday, skipper Maria, through October."

From Racing & Standings, set up the pieces in order: classes your club races (one-design or PHRF — most clubs only need one), a season and its series (e.g. "Wednesday Night Series," with how many worst finishes get discarded), then regattas and the individual races within them — either tied to a series, or standalone for a one-off event.

Every series (and every standalone regatta) has its own entries roster — which boat and skipper is racing, per class, plus a PHRF rating if the class is PHRF-scored (a boat provides its rating to the race committee at the start of the season/regatta, so it's entered here rather than being fixed to the boat). Setting up a new roster from scratch every time gets old fast — use Copy roster from… to duplicate an existing series or regatta's entries instead of retyping the same boats and skippers.

Once a race exists, Enter results lets you record each boat's finish. Everything here is exactly what you'd write on a scoresheet: start time, finish time, race time, and — for PHRF classes — corrected time, plus DNC/DNS/DNF/DSQ/OCS/RET for anyone who didn't finish normally. The app doesn't clock or correct anything itself; it just ranks whoever finished by race time (or PHRF time) and works out place and points from that. Standings recompute immediately; correcting a result later updates every standing it rolls up into automatically.

Generate this period's dues creates one invoice per member per membership tier for the current billing period. Safe to run more than once — anyone already billed this period is simply skipped, not double-charged.

For dues collected outside the app, resolve an invoice by hand with Mark paid or Waive next to it in the outstanding-invoices list.

Connecting Stripe

Connect Stripe starts your club's own Stripe Connect onboarding — Stripe's own hosted identity/business verification, not a form inside this app. Until it's complete, members see a banner that online payment isn't set up yet, and Pay now isn't available to them.

Platform Admins manage the list of every club on the platform from their own console, separate from any one club's own login. From there, provision a new organization by hand — name, subdomain, timezone, currency, units — and set its chief admin, the same end state a club owner reaches on their own via Start your club, just done on their behalf (useful for white-glove or sales-assisted onboarding).

A Platform Admin can enter a specific club's data to help troubleshoot something, but only as an explicit, time-boxed action taken from that club's own detail page in the console — never silent, standing access, and always recorded in that club's own audit trail.