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A coach on the shore only sees your boat from one angle for a limited window. A camera mounted on your own dinghy sees everything, every session, and does not forget what happened. This guide covers where to mount it, mast top, boom, bow, stern, and even the rudder, what kind of camera actually holds up on the water, and how to line the footage up against your GPS and speed data so you know not just what went wrong, but why.

A results sheet tells you where you finished. Replay tells you why, by playing your GPS track back as a moving boat you can scrub through tack by tack, or lining up a whole fleet on the same map to see who actually had the better angle. This post covers how replay works from upload to playback, what it does for an individual sailor and for a club running a race night, how it differs from live tracking, and how it compares to RaceQs, TackTracker, Kwindoo, and the professional tracking systems behind events like the America's Cup.

VMG, velocity made good, is the number that explains why the faster boat does not always reach the mark first. This guide covers what VMG actually measures, the pointing versus footing trade-off, reading polars, why sailing extra distance downwind wins races, the live-VMG trap, and how to measure all of it from a plain GPS track without instruments.

Most sailors now carry a GPS logger without thinking about it, but the tools for turning that data into something useful vary enormously depending on what kind of sailing you actually do. This post compares the main sailing analytics platforms available today, including SailingMetrics, RaceQs, TackTracker, Kwindoo, eStela, Expedition, Sailmon, Velocitek, the Vakaros Atlas, and the professional systems behind America's Cup coverage, and works through which one actually fits club racing, dinghy training, offshore passages, or event organisation.

SailingMetrics now supports Vakaros VKX files, the native telemetry format of the Atlas 2 and Atlas Edge. If you have been uploading GPX exports from the Vakaros app, switching to VKX gives you the full 10 Hz sample rate, heel and heading data from the onboard IMU, and start line geometry from your pre-race pings. This post explains what is in a VKX file, how to export it, and what you will find in your analysis once it is uploaded.

Sailing races are mostly invisible to the people who care about the sailors in them. The action happens a kilometre offshore and all you can do is wait. SailingMetrics live tracking changes that: with a single shared link and no app required, family members and spectators ashore can follow every boat on the water in real time, see who is leading, and get notified the moment a specific sail number crosses the finish line.

Accurate wind data is the foundation of fast sailing and until now, SailingMetrics users had to estimate it by hand. Version 1.0.84 changes that with native Bluetooth support for the Calypso Ultrasonic Wind Meter. Live wind speed and direction now stream directly from the sensor to your phone, attach to every GPS fix in your recording, and feed automatically into VMG, tacking analysis, and league race scoring. No wiring, no proprietary displays, just clip it to the shroud and go.

We have just launched a new analysis feature that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to track how your body moves through every tack in your session. For the first time, SailingMetrics can show you the data behind your tacking technique, so you can see what your coach sees from the shore and start making real, measurable improvements.

Compare GPS tracks from multiple sailors on the same map, automatically segment each track into upwind, reach, and downwind legs using gate lines and marks, and analyse duration, distance, average speed, and VMC side by side. SailingMetrics Course Analysis gives coaches and sailors a data-driven debrief that goes beyond reviewing a single track at a time.

Recording a GPS track during a sailing session is easy. Almost every sailor with a smartphone does it. But most of that data never gets properly looked at, and when it does, it often gets reduced to a colourful line on a map and a top speed number. The real value is buried a little deeper, and once you know where to look, a single session's GPS file can tell you more about your sailing than a month of vague feedback from the shore.