Instructions for using the Online Keelboat Reservation System

Thank you for purchasing the TR801 Uber Interblag Reserver... just kidding. The online reservation calendar is really quite simple to use. It requires internet access (preferably Internet Explorer/Firefox/Safari), your WYC#, and a password. Everyone should have their WYC membership cards which have their WYC#s written on them. If you are for some reason still not able to find your WYC#, email Edward Marsh at edm3@cs.washington.edu, and he can look it up and reply within a day usually.

Getting your password

Most people will not know what their password is. To get a new password sent to the email address we have listed for you on file, follow the link on the keelboat calendar login page, http://www.washingtonyachtclub.org/calendar/kb/login.php or go directly to http://www.washingtonyachtclub.org/wycdb/db.cgi?pg=NeedPW and enter you WYC# - within about 10 seconds you will receive your password, assuming not everyone at the club is doing this at the same time. The passwords that are automatically generated might seem a little bit strange, they are usually about 3 random words concatenated together. You will then need to login with that password and change it. To do this, select and copy the password from the automatically generated email, and go to http://www.washingtonyachtclub.org/wycdb/ which is also linked from the keelboat calendar login page. Enter your WYC# and new password here and login. Find and click the “set my password” link on the left, enter a password that does not contain any punctuation marks and click “Set.” You are now ready to login to the keelboat calendar.

Login and navigate the system

Go to http://www.washingtonyachtclub.org/calendar/kb/login.php or you can omit the login.php from that hyperlink and go to http://www.washingtonyachtclub.org/calendar/kb which will auto-redirect to the login page if you are not yet logged in. Enter you WYC# and password (see above to get WYC# and password).

You will now be looking at the main screen of the calendar. If we did a good job of designing this system, then this screen should not be too surprising. If you are in the sail locker, the sub-heading will say “You may use this calendar to reserve a boat. Happy sailing!,” if you are not, it will say “To reserve a boat, you must login (not as a guest) using the computer in the sail locker.” In the top right is a reminder to logout. Similar to the MyUW website, you need to remember to logout at the end of your session to prevent people from reserving a boat under your name. Directly below, and still on the right, is an example calendar day, showing both Charlotte (always colored blue) and Rascal (always colored red) checked out for both the morning period (3am-3pm) and the afternoon period (3pm-3am following day).

Written below that, centered and in gray it says “You are logged in as (your username). Logout when you are finished!” Below that and on the left, you should see forward/backward navigational buttons and the month you looking at written out. On the right at the same level is a link to let you jump to our present month.

The calendar itself shows days of the current month with a white background, except for today's date, which has a yellow background. Days of the previous and next month, which are visible in the current month's rectangle are colored with a gray background. Existing reservations will appear on the calendar in a similar way to the example in the top right, except that the person's last name will be written as a hyperlink on the little blue/red colored rectangle in place of “Charlotte Morning” etc as in the example. You can see more information about a reservation, and also leave a comment, by clicking on the hyperlinked person's last name, where it appears on each day they have reserved. All comments posted to a reservation will be accompanied by the poster's first/last name, and a date and time he/she posted the comment.

If you are not standing now in the WAC, then that is about the limit to what you can do with the calendar. It is club policy that you must be in the WAC in order to reserve a boat, so that you can physically put your cheque in the sail locker lockbox, same as you always have done.

How to reserve a keelboat

If you are in the WAC, using the computer there, then the keelboat calendar page will look a little different. A link saying “Make a reservation” will appear, centered, above you name with a gray background. Also, some date numbers written in the top left of each day on the calendar will be hyperlinks with a darker red color, rather than normal black text. Dates which are hyperlinks are valid dates to make a reservation. Dates in the past will not have hyperlinks. By clicking a date, instead of the “Make a reservation” link described earlier in this paragraph, that date is automatically entered into the reservation form, otherwise today's date is entered.

When clicking either a date link or the “Make a reservation” link, the reservation form will appear on top of the calendar with a heading “Make Reservation.” You can move this form around in the same way you move normal windows, by dragging the top, gray colored, bar. You can only move it around within the browser window though. You may find this useful if you need to see something under the form, otherwise it just takes a lot of CPU power and you might notice it lag a bit.

On the form, use the drop down menu to select the boat you wish to reserve. The next line is your WYC# entered automatically. You cannot change this here, and if it is not your WYC#, then you are logged in using someone else's account. The next line is the Reserve from line. If you wish to change the date, simply make sure that the date you entered matches the format that was auto-populated, MM-DD-YYYY. If you enter the date in the wrong format, you will likely get an error when you submit, if no error, it might be interpreting your malformed date as a different, valid, date. Don't worry! There is a confirmation page, where the computer will tell you what it thinks you are trying to reserve, and you will see any errors there. Select whether you want to begin your reservation in the morning or in the afternoon.

The same goes for the next line, Reserve until. Destination is a required field, and you can enter any information, under 50 characters long here. Anything over 50 characters will simply not be stored. 50 characters is a lot of text for a place name, for example, if you entered “Lake Chaubunagungamaug,” you would only have used 22 of your 50 available characters. If you were to spell out the full name of the lake, “Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg,” then you will have used all 50 of your 50 available characters and you would be too tired to go there.

The Number of crew is not a required field; if you enter nothing then the system assumes you are taking 0 crew (going alone). Contact phone might be auto-populated, if you have a phone number on file, however even if you don't, it is a required field – formatting the telephone number is not required in any way. Comments are optional. I wouldn't write any essays here, but you can note that you are looking for additional crew, or whatever.

Click the gray “Reserve” button at the bottom of the Make Reservation form, and you will be taken to the confirmation page – or a boring page telling you you missed entering a piece of data and that you need to go back. The confirmation page is the last chance you have to change a reservation. Once you re-enter your password and click “Finalize Reservation”, your reservation becomes final, and you would have to talk to the fleet boat captain or perhaps another officer to get that reservation changed/deleted.

Click “Finalize Reservation.” If the information you entered was a valid reservation time, with all the correct fields filled out and it adheres to the club policies (see below), then you will see a page of beautifully formatted text starting with “Reservation successful!” This page, same as the page which gives you details about an existing reservation, talked about along way above, tells you the number of full/half weekends/days and holidays that your reservation covers. The important parts about this page, which help you with your payment are the “invoice number,” and the “total owed amount.” The invoice number is linked to all your reservation information and so by providing an invoice number on your cheque envelope, you do not need to write anything else – although personally I will probably still write my name on any cash I put in there, just to make sure. Since some of the data pertaining to student status is not guaranteed to be completely up-to-date, both the student/non-student prices are calculated and listed for your reservation. Follow one of the two “(more info)” links to see the fees used in the calculation of the prices. It is possible that at some point those prices change, and then the system will incorrectly calculate the price, until updated, so I would advice doing a quick math check on the numbers.

Clicking “Go back to calendar” at the bottom of the page will take you to the calendar, looking at the first day of your reservation. You should now see your last name (or part of it if it's a long name) appear over each half day you reserved.

Club keelboat reservation policies

1. Members cannot have more than 3 future reservations at a time.

2. Members cannot reserve a boat for more than 2 weeks at a time.

3. Members cannot make a half day reservation more than a day ahead of time. This includes longer reservations that end in a half day.

That is all there is to it. Send comments and questions to Edward Marsh at edm3@cs.washington.edu.

Happy Sailing!

/Edward