The holy grail of sailboat performance comparison is to sort out how fast it goes when we know what the surrounding conditions— wind and water movement— are. It’s actually quite complicated, and I confess that I don’t have a final answer to this question, yet. This post is about one part of it, however, calibrating boat speed.
Category: Data
Charlotte — Your Digital Crew Member
With a frozen sea, you can’t sail (in the water anyway), so you have to do something else. Here’s an update about the boat tracking and digital logbook system I’ve been working on.
Hanse 388 Real-Life Performance
With a few hundred million more speed and wind data points in the database, here’s some fresh sailing performance data, and some humble guesses as to what it all means.
GPS Precision
Our Hanse 388 has three different GPS devices. A couple of days ago, when I was sorting through the position data, I came across some interesting glitches.
Calibrating Heading
Last week, during my fun solo sail from Finland to Åland and back, I had some issues with engaging the autopilot. Regular commentator and Hanse 385 owner Stuart chimed in (thank you!), and suggested I should check the calibration. So I did!
Hanse 388 Performance 2.0
Last year I wrote a post summing up our first season sailing performance. Now, a couple of months into our second season, I think it’s clear that we’ve already found a better gear! In this post, I’ll share some data from a two-day solo sail I did this week.
Some Videos
Last weekend, it was still too cold and also a bit too windy to go out sailing with the family. I played around with some other things, though!
Wind Polars
Sailboat polar diagrams usually tell us what the boatspeed will be, based on wind speed and angle. I thought it would be nice to flip it the other way: if we want to achieve at least, let’s say, three knots of boatspeed, what kind of wind will we need to achieve that?
Hanse 388 Speed and Polars
So, how fast does our Hanse 388 go? This summer, we gathered over twenty million data points to compare our sailing speeds with what HanseYachts’ marketing material had promised. Here are the results.
A Digital Logbook
Since I was about eight years old, one of my hobbies has been to code, to make computer programs. I love the creative process, and also the off chance of finding some new ways of piecing old puzzles together. This post is about my small sailing logbook coding project.
EDIT (18.3.2021): This version of the logbook is now deprecated! For the current version, check this post: Charlotte – Your Digital Crew Member.