Just because Navionics says its so doesn’t mean to say it is.

Seventh or eighth mark of the course, I lost track, was the South Cardinal off Boscombe Pier, Bournemouth. Our part of the fleet reached the mark in close company about midnight on a dark, starry, moonless night. The cardinal is off Bournemouth seafront and marks Boscombe Pier and an artificial reef.

Navionics marks the cardinal as being lit with the standard combination of white lights. The reality is that the mark is unlit.

Watch us explore our collected race data in real time on Rockit …… there is no sound track !

….stupid title must think of a better one for the next article…

So in the last article I talked about the Fastnet Race and what was involved for the crew. We are now one month into our campaign. Our boat is back in the water and we have had a couple of weekends out on the water so we know what does and doesn’t work.

We have been sailing Jengu now for 7 seasons; albeit with two COVID disrupted years in the middle. Each year we learn a little more and become a little more sophisticated in our sailing. Some weeks it might not look like that but we try to repeat the things that work and understand why the things that don’t work don’t. We strongly believe that it’s foolish to expect a different result if you keep doing the same thing.

This year is the 50th edition of the Fastnet race. Its run every two years. The first race was won by Jolie Brise in 1925. Jolie Breeze is still very actively sailed on the UK South Coast.

This will be the second time that the race has been sailed from Cowes to Cherbourg via the Fastnet rather than finishing in Plymouth.

Our test boat Jengu will be doing the Fastnet race this year; so it seems appropriate to document some of that journey.

Weed and other marine wildlife, whose main aim in life sometimes seems to be to slow us down, grow at different rates depending on a whole host of variables, everything from how sunny a spot the boat is parked in to the time of year.

Even over the course of a day marine life will start to stick to the bottom of your boat.

When we originally developed Rockit we used various methods to get data into the Laptop that was running the software. Back then circa 2016 (cue a certain amount of nostalgia) we used to connect things up by bending wires together. You could say our wiring looked slightly agricultural but it was probably closer to the techniques I was using to build a model train set with my son… in fact quite of a lot of the tools we used were dual use…

Time has moved on, the 10 year old is at university and we can now buy a range of products that make it really easy to extract data from a boats network with a bare minimum of wiring.

In the last post we talked about the need to know when you are really going fast; not just thinking you are going fast.

If we know when we are fast should we not be able to work out exactly what we are doing to make the boat go fast ?

We all know the feeling we hit the top of a wave the boat surfs accelerates then goes quiet, everyone watches the numbers on the mast instruments and at that point you set the highest speed score for the day. You put a score on the board for everyone else who helms the boat that day to beat….. and when they don’t you have bragging rights for a little while.

The question though is are you actually going as fast as you should be and if you are do actually know ?

VMG appears on a lot of marine instrument systems but is in our opinion not well understood.

The standard definition is;