Welcome to BlueWater Racing 101 !
A ‘course’ that will take you from router novice to seasoned pro by simply folowing along a series of Articles, Tutorials and ‘Homeworks’ or Excercises designed to help any and all become proficient in using routing tools with sailonline races 🙂
I will construct this for those completely new to Bluewater, even to using any software routing tool, so by the time you work your way through all the Articles/Homeworks/Tutorials, you;ll be routing like a pro 😉
But for those already using the program, or indeed any other (as many things are not router specific, although some are), there should be a nugget or 2 of good and hopefully new information – no need to work through step by step of course, just pick and choose the bits you want….
Some of the ‘Lessons’ in the course will be just pdf’s to download and read, I wont reproduce them all here on the blog, and some will have accompanying polar, grib and sometimes gpx files to use along with the pdf. Other times I will just point you to information somewhere else 😉
There will also be articles detailing using Bluewater to aid in SOTP routing on SOL – truely !
I would also encourage those already experienced in using routers, to post some tips as comments on the ‘Community Tips’ page. If enough get posted I will also create a pdf for just the tips to.
- A (very) Gentle Introduction to Bluewater Racing – or read it as a pdf in the zip file
- Work through the tutorials found in the installation folder under Bluewater/docs/tutorial/index.htm – experiment and become familiar with the User interface. There are a few quirks to it – it is free software, so is not quite as ‘polished’ as something like Expedition (but who cares about a few error messages compared to forking out $1600USD!!?) – but it is great software – and very easy to use once you are familiar with its UI…
- Creating Marks and Routes/Courses, pdf file only – available here
- Getting your GPS data into Bluewater (and a tip on using that data) – Post here
Tips from the Community – PLEASE contribute if you can!
Sailonline.org Tools 
#1 by WhyNot on June 6, 2011 - 12:26
Only one question Aaron: “Do you ever find time to sleep?” Racing, working in the engineroom, createing tools and writing tutorials.
Tom
#2 by bc on November 15, 2011 - 01:25
So are the SOL courses published in bluewater format anywhere?
#3 by AGage on November 15, 2011 - 04:12
Yes.
Over to the left, you will see ‘2011 Races’ under ‘Race GPX’
That page is a list of SOL races to date (this year), with the course in various formats. The ‘bwr’ link contains the course for BWR, and the polar. All you need do is unzip the file directly into your Bluewater installation folder, and the 2 files will be placed under their respective folders (ie races and polars)