SARA Regatta vs TideRoute Sailing

SARA, Sail and Race audioguide, is an application designed to provide navigation information using voice synthesis during a sailing race. Although designed by and for blind sailors, SARA respects the principle of design for all and proves to be quite useful for sighted people when their eyes have too many things to look after. SARA allows to get information concerning direction and speed. When a route is activated, It also allows to get bearing, distance and CMG to the next mark. We remind that CMG (course make good) is the projected speed on a direct route, which determines the best tack to make to reach the next mark. Although all the information is accessible manually using voice over or just watching the screen, the goal of SARA is to announce the information when the sailor needs it. For each information it’s possible to set automatic announcements. For example, if the course announcement is set each 10 degrees, the information will be given when it turns from 250 to 260 degrees but there will be no information while the course is maintained between 251 and 269 degrees. Each information can also be set according to a minimum time of repetition in order to hear SARA only when you wish to. For instance, if the minimum repetition time is set to 10 seconds, SARA will give you the information at the beginning of the tacking and then 10 seconds later, even if the course has varied by 90 degrees during the manoeuvre. In this way the sailor is informed but can keep the most important thing in mind: listen to the wind! Once the positions of the marks have been either plotted out or entered into the system and once the route has been activated, the information is announced at reasonable intervals. The information gives the distance and orientation of the starting line. Then each time you pass a line, a mark or a door, this will entail an automatic activation of the following mark. Thus you can follow your exact position during a regatta. Who said we had to see clearly for racing? Next developments will concern speech recognition, subscription to the course via internet and management of collisions with other vessels.

TideRoute Sailing plans and runs your passages, under sail or under power: routing, multi-model GRIB, current and tide, ORC polars, marine charts. Free to start. US NOAA CHARTS Free interactive nautical charts from the Great Lakes to Florida: tap a light to see its details. The Gulf Stream is in the routing, with a wind-against-current alert. THE ROUTING, AND WHY IT IS FASTER Draw your route, pick a departure time, run the calculation. The isochrone algorithm looks for the fastest track from your polar, the wind, the swell, the current, the day/night cycle and your motoring rules, while clearing the coast. Measured on Groix-Ouessant, same GRIB and same polar, 100 % sailing: 16 h 57 for 100 miles, against 20 h 40 for 152 miles on a well-established consumer router. Three hours forty less, 18 %. The gap comes from the algorithm, not from the engine. AND FOR MOTORBOATS Raise the "Motor below" setting above any speed under sail and enter your motoring speed: the routing becomes a power calculation, current, tide, swell and coastline included. Against a 5-knot tidal race, an 8-knot motor cruiser stakes its day on the time of passage. THE CURRENT IS PART OF THE CALCULATION Current is not a decorative overlay: it enters the routing. Useful wind is taken in the water frame, and speed over ground follows. • From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, 412 current areas of at least 1 knot, surveyed over a full spring cycle • Fine mesh where current makes the day: our own 100 m model on the English coast, Ifremer 250 m in Brittany and the Channel, BSH on the Elbe and the Belts, Copernicus Marine elsewhere • Tide computed on board: heights, high and low waters, at any date, with no network • Best departure time: a sweep compares the departures in your window and keeps the one that passes the races at the right moment WEATHER AND MODELS • ECMWF and GFS offshore, up to 10 and 16 days • AROME 1.3 km and ARPEGE 0.1° (Meteo-France), ICON-EU 7 km and ICON-D2 2.2 km (DWD) • The finest model for the area is offered; the GRIB follows the extent of your route THE SOLENT, MODELLED FOR ITSELF General-purpose current sources work on a 1.5 km grid — three cells across a channel three miles wide. We built our own: a hydrodynamic model of the Solent, the Isle of Wight, Hurst and the Needles on a 100 m mesh. Developed with AI assistance, from open data, checked against published tide gauge records. Harmonic tide: currents for any date, months ahead. YOUR POLAR, MEASURED UNDER WAY Start from the monohull and multihull library, from the ORC database — thousands of certified boats — or from your own CSV and .pol files. Then build your own at sea. The capture workshop (experimental) fills an angle / wind-speed grid cell by cell as you sail: it waits for a settled regime, discards the minutes after a manoeuvre, flags doubtful cells. Interpolate the gaps, correct by hand, merge outings, export to .pol or .csv. That is your boat, not the sister-ship's. The display then puts your speed against the target: 96 % upwind, you are still looking; 103 %, you are holding the right trim. ON BOARD • Instrument display (NMEA 0183, Signal K) • Alarms: anchor drag, shallow water, strong wind, cross-track error, battery • AIS, tracks, passage table, GPX export • OpenStreetMap and OpenSeaMap charts: marks, soundings, seagrass • Offline: cached charts, GRIB kept on board, tide computed without network • Comparator: overlay several routings and replay them GFS wind routing is free, without limit. Auto-renewing subscription: it renews unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the period, and can be managed in your App Store account settings. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/