Sail the real weather. Sharpen your routing.
Practise offshore routing on weather that is actually happening. Enter a virtual boat in a race, submit a route, and it sails through the wind and current of the day. You work from the same data you would have on board: the course, a polar and a daily GRIB. Every boat has the same polar, so the routing wins, not the boat. Afterwards, compare your track with the others, and with the boats that sailed the course for real, to see where your choices gained and lost.
Beta. Run by one person for a club-sized fleet; things change, and the race log says when. Problems or questions: open an issue.
Race board
First race? Start here
You don't need routing software or offshore experience. The boat is virtual; the weather is real.
- Create an account below, open an upcoming race, and enter a boat on its page. Entries close at the gun.
- Draw a route. Click Draw on chart, click a line of waypoints from start to finish, and submit. A straight line is a fine first route. The leaderboard will show you why the leaders didn't sail one.
- Check the weather once a day. Download the race's on-board forecast (a GRIB file with the same wind your boat sails in) and adjust the part of your route you haven't sailed yet.
- Try routing software. qtVlm is free. Import the race's course route and polar, load the GRIB, compute a route, export it as GPX and upload it here.
- Compare afterwards. Download your sailed track as GPX and overlay it on the real fleet's to see where you gained and lost.
The full rules, the weather model and the file formats are on How it works.