TackTracker

We’d all like to improve our sailing, but often it’s hard to really know what to improve. On a typical weekend, the good guys are quickly in front and there is no way to tell what they are doing right and you wrong.

Sometimes a race is lost on a “bad leg”, but what actually happened and what went exactly went wrong? Often we never find out. How do we identify our current weakest point of sailing that we should be attending to first? What is needed is information; hard facts, that are often not available to you on the race course.

With the availability of inexpensive GPS tracking devices, such as the QStarz BT-Q1000X, it’s now easy to record a boat’s track around the course. And with TackTracker, you can play your GPS tracks and watch the race again, as it happened or navigate tack by tack.

But TackTracker is much more than just a player. It is a race analyser, and can give us leg by leg information on how far we have sailed, how fast we were going, and how high we pointed on both port and starboard tack.TackTracker can even deduce the ambient wind direction, and indicate which tack a boat is on at any time, and whether it was close hauled, reaching or running!

Its fun to play your track around the course, and there are plenty of things to learn. The real value is attained when a number of sailors get together and share their tracks with each other. Then you can ascertain who travelled the shortest distance on the windward leg, who was sailing fastest, and who highest. At moments in the race where you may have fallen back, you can see what you were doing in relation to the other boats you were competing with.

A Complete GPS Solution

TackTracker is designed to deliver a complete solution, streamlining and automating the entire process from uploading tracks into the software, archiving and managing tracks, to viewing and playing tracks.

The track browser maintains a library of your tracks organised by date, so you can easily find tracks from past races. You can select individual tracks, or an event (race) which may contain multiple tracks. As each track or event is selected, it is displayed in the track player.

The track player has a group of navigation buttons at the bottom, which you can use to drive your boat around the course. You can also press "Play" and sit back and watch. Then speed up and slow down the action as required.

The track player lets you pan and zoom with the mouse, or you can turn on "auto zoom" to have the player automatically track the race boats. You can also drag the mouse to create a distance and bearing meter allowing you to assess the separation between boats at any point.

Races are defined in the "Event Editor", where you set the start time and lay the course marks. This is all done graphically, allowing you to define the course in a matter of minutes. Once the course is defined, all participating tracks are analysed and all race legs computed. The Legs table gives you a summary of all the key statistics for each leg for each competitor.

You can sort the table by any column to compare results for any leg or competitor. Powerful!

TackTracker also has a great range of interactive charts that provide additional insight into your boat's performance. The speed chart shows boat speed over the course of the current leg, whilst the deviation chart shows how high or low you are sailing to the true course. Together, these charts are an effective visual summary of your sailing efficiency.

The vertical bar indicates your current location. As your boats progress through the leg, the bar moves to the right. Alternatively, you can drag the bar with the mouse, and the boats will follow. (My daughter says this is really cool!)

There's lots more to TackTracker, but this will serve as a quick introduction.

To learn more, the best thing you can do is download and install the free race player from the Download page. You can watch and interact with races available online that have been recorded at regattas for a range of classes. You can also read the User Guide, available from here.

I hope you have fun using TackTracker and that it helps you improve your sailing.

Geoff Smith