Using BWR to Route the Shetland – Lerwick to Bergen Race

While testing the course file before making it available here on the 2012 Races page, I ran into a curious situation with the routing parameters. Basically, if you try to route the whole race as one route, you need to set grid size at about 2nm (and a corresponding max dist.). But because the first leg is […]

A Script to Speedup your BWR Route Optimisation by Trimming the Grib

This is actually a small Tcl script for Bluewater Racing wraps up 2 console functions that some of you may already use – and for those who don’t it will make using them a whole lot easier. The 2 functions being extracting a subset of the data from a grib file, and then saving that to […]

New Site for New Tools

Markku, aka ‘hmm’ on SOL has kindly given me a subdomain on his server – agage.sol.hmm.iki.fi – somewhere to host Flash applications written for use with Sailonline. As I mentioned, I originally intended for the Optimal Angles Tool to be online using Flash instead of something you needed to download (like the AIR version) for a […]

Optimum Angles Tool v2

I have updated the Optimum Angles Tool to support use on multiple races simultaneously. The description/instruction page (listed under ‘My Tools’ to the right, or above) has been updated to reflect the changes. The download link on that page now points to the new version.  

How the Client and Other Tools Get Your Data from Sailonline

Time for some demystification… I know it seems to many that accessing boat (and weather, etc) data from sailonline requires some insider knowledge or special privileges on the server even, but this is not the case. Obviously some technical knowledge is required, but that is all – nothing more. The actual race client makes a series of normal HTTP (web) requests to the […]

Using the VMG/C Calculator to Determine Favoured end of the Finish Line

So, now the tool is available, the next question is when and how to make use of it. (OK, perhaps that is 2 questions?) One usage that works all the time (by that I mean, for example, it is not always best to sail max VMC to the Mark) – is to determine which end […]

New Tool – Compute Optimal Angles Automatically

I still haven’t had time to fully complete my SOL Toolkit, and it’s Windows only (too much effort in code to completely start over) –  I’m feeling a little guilty for not delivering something I said I would…. Of the tools I have completed, this is the one I use most often (and the one […]

SOL GE Feeds now available to view in browser

You can now view the Sailonline Google Earth feed for each race (starting with Gasparilla Raid) right in your Web Browser. Under the Category ‘Race GPX’ to the right is a new page titled ‘Google Earth Feeds‘, which will contain a link for each race you can view. By default the map opens in the […]

Different links layout for the 2012 Races page

As you probably already know, I try to put race files for the 2 most common routers used on SOL, as well as ‘raw’ GPX for importing into other programs like Google Earth or other Nav software, on the Races page (except for the very short ‘non-routable’ races). A recent update of Expedition allows it […]

Please post comments …

… with any results/experience using the TCL script for the Iceland timed race. Thanks