pretty strange current movements.’ James Lyne is another TP52 coach, in his case for Quantum Racing, although the new America’s Cup challenge, American Magic, is increasingly taking his attention. SailTokyo is forming an integral part of the Cup campaign, but Lyne is not at liberty to say exactly how. ‘Some of the America's Cup stuff that we’re doing with SailTokyo I’m not really going to talk about, but it has certainly been very useful for the Quantum Racing TP52 campaign over the past season. ‘We’ve been using it as a
predictor. Rather than just relying on our own memories and saying, “Oh, remember that Tuesday in 2015 at Palma Vela? Today’s a synoptic day like that.” As well as using our own experiences of a venue, we can now bring in SailTokyo and we can input the different models and run the boat up the course. So it's a whole new way of looking at the day forward. From my perspective, as a coach, we are always looking a day behind us. We're always having a debrief about the day behind us whereas SailTokyo is great because it's like a pre-briefing about the day ahead of us.’ The ability to “crystal ball” the day has started to make SailTokyo a must-have tool for Lyne and his sailing team.
As well as enabling teams to forecast the likely conditions for the day ahead, the latest version of SailTokyo also includes some very strong debriefing features, to help sailors and coaches see how – with the benefit of hindsight – they might have played the day differently. SailTokyo processes readings of currents, wind and tracks. These data – measured on a sailing boat or by coach boats during the race – provide the backdrop for analyses of the theoretically best course. Tracks can be overlaid with this optimal course to gain a deep insight into where things went right and where
While many racing teams are using SailTokyo as a predictor, others are
deploying it as a post-race briefing tool. Data readings (currents, wind speeds and tracks) are logged by a yacht’s instruments or recorded by a coach boat following a dinghy around the course. These are then processed by SailTokyo, enabling
coaches and racing crew to overlay their actual tracks and compare them with the theoretical best possible track on that course, in those exact conditions
they could have gone better. One of the challenges for new users of SailTokyo is to grasp its full capability, but one of the best ways into the software is to find a particular feature that appeals to you and make it work for you until it becomes part of your routine. James Lyne can recall his first encounter with SailTokyo during the build-up to the 2015 edition of the Melges 20 World Championships in San Francisco: ‘We built our own polars and inputted those into the system. We were down on the Berkeley Circle where the current was doing two things, flooding in from the west but also making a big bend, out to the north. So it's a big, effectively a right bend of current. This can make it hard to get your head around the whole cross-current aspect of the area. And I suppose that's where we learned more than anything because we sort of didn't believe the output to start with. And obviously with the Samba Pa Ti programme and the Wild Man programme, we had two boats, identical gear, world-class sailors and we spent quite a lot of time each day “ground-truthing” the tidal prediction. In other words, if start time for the championship was at 1pm, then at 1pm each training day we’d have one boat go left up the course, one go right and we tested the course for a hundred days. We felt the need to do this validation, this ground- truthing process, because it was our first time using the software and it was predicting things that, when you look just at the tidal data, you wouldn't think are correct. But the more we sailed there and tested it, the more we realised just how incredibly accurate were the deltas being predicted by SailTokyo.’ John Kilroy’s Samba Pa Ti would go on to win those Worlds
comfortably while his 12-year-old son Liam would come third, just a point off second place, skippering Wild
Man. There were many good reasons for the success of the programme, but Lyne says SailTokyo played a key role in giving the two crews great confidence in their strategic planning and decision making. Just how Lyne and his cohorts at American Magic will be using SailTokyo to try to win the 2021 America’s Cup, we will perhaps have to wait a few years to see, however Lyne is very excited about the possibilities. ‘Of course we could have developed our own in-house solution, but time is always the most precious resource and SailTokyo gives us a lot of what we need in a package that is very customisable. There was really little point in us spending time trying to do our own thing when we already have a great relationship with Buell. Ingo and Yvette have always been very open to new ideas and we enjoy working with them.’
Dynamic Grid Routing - the best short-course solution Most routing software is based on isochronic routing. This works well for long-distance offshore racing but for shorter distances a different, more accurate tool is needed. Buell Software’s unique routing algorithm reflects the characteristics of Olympic and inshore races. This enables highly accurate calculation of best courses even over short distances such as we see on windward-leeward courses or any other inshore race course.
buell-software.com q
The latest version of SailTokyo also includes some very strong debriefing features to help sailors and coaches see how – with the benefit of hindsight – they might have played the day differently. It’s about creating greater insight into where they went right, and where things could have gone better. The debriefing element of SailTokyo makes it possible to: 1. Visualise the wind measured during the race (measured on sailing boat or accompanying coach boat)
2. Calculate dynamic fields of wind out of these data
3. Visualise the position of the boats plus their readings at any time
4. Have a correct picture of what the wind was like at any time of the race
5. Calculate what would have been the best course in this wind
6. Check the history of the wind in a strip chart
7. Visualise tracks from a race and compare these tracks versus the best course calculated.
SEAHORSE 69
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