There is no substitute for actually being aboard a great ocean racer as their crews cope with the best and worst Mother Nature has to offer. But the clever application of some the newest web technology is making it easier for those of us sailing from armchairs to follow along – often in real time.
Many of the big races – America's Cup, Newport-Bermuda, and the Volvo Ocean Race, just to name a few – now have an online presence that can give you almost everything but the salt spray itself. Even some of the smaller coastal ocean contests, the ones that include amateur crews of family and friends, are going high-tech, with tracking systems that let us all follow along.
It is hard to put into such a few words the full essence of this race, the boats, the amount of water we saw flying down the deck, the stress of watching hundreds of miles of lead disappear, the cold, the wet, the best and the worst sailing of my life, the moments of despair and the euphoria at winning. This is a unique race which attracts the highest level of sporting contest.
Mike Sanderson, Skipper – ABN AMRO ONE
Winner, 2006 Volvo Ocean Race
Ironically, as recreational sailing contracts – boat sales fell by half since 2000 – serious, often extreme ocean racing – is exploding, with major races going on nearly all the time. Perhaps it's no surprise that the presence of the big sail races on the web has mirrored the growth of the web itself. The Whitbread round-the-world race in 1997-1998 (which was re-named for its sponsor Volvo in 2001) was one of the first to have a major online presence. Positions, news items, emails from the boats and stacks of background information were all posted on a website, guaranteeing a massive new audience who could follow the race as it happened in real time.
Today, the easy availability of GPS technology and the explosion of ever-more-capable marine electronics have insured that online interest in the sport continues to grow.
With the advent of small, relatively inexpensive GPS receivers, and greater access to low-orbiting satellites, companies developed tracking systems that were first used on trucking fleets, and then for maritime applications. One of those companies is Horizon Marine, which used a simple tracking buoy to help scientists and oil companies study currents in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Realizing the technology could be used to track fleets of racing sailboats – and with the experience in-hand to create devices for the harsh, saltwater environment – Horizon established a division of its company called iBoattrack.
George Owen is the manager if iBoattrack, which now supplies tracking systems to many race organizers. According to Owen, iBoattrack uses a small, notebook-sized device that is mounted on the upper deck of a sailboat. The devices have their own Lithium batteries, which will power the devices for about 30 days, long enough for most racers to return to their home ports. "We've done some really big races, like the Chicago-Mackinac race this summer, which had more than 430 entries," Owen says.
VOLVO OCEAN RACEOcean Racing with a Canting KeeliBoattrack maintains a website that collects and processes the boats' raw position data and then displays it in a sophisticated, interactive format. Viewers can select which boats to follow and view time-lapse tracks forward and back to see how the fleet disperses after the start. There is often the ability to overlay important environmental factors, such as sea-surface temperatures and surface winds. This can reveal the probable strategy of the skippers as they change course to take advantage of wind and currents along their routes.
DATA DELAYS
Talbot Wilson, who provides public relations support for several major sail races each year, says online race tracking has become "essential" to the their overall success. However, he also notes that intentional delays in posting data have become a requirement of several race organizers, who "apparently feel it could be used by some of the racers themselves to gain some kind of tactical advantage."
Wilson disagrees that there is a danger, noting that a captain who learns that another skipper seems to have better conditions 20 miles to the east "isn't going to go three hours out of his way just to find out the conditions and the competitor have moved on."
The organizers of the Newport-Bermuda race, one of the best-known races in the world, this year insisted on a four-hour delay for online tracking. iBoattrack's Owen says one or two others have asked for delays of "perhaps an hour or so," but that most organizers don't think there's an issue.
Owen points out that the system may be most useful to a race captain after the race, when "they can go back into the archive, which we keep online, and replay their own track, isolating it from the rest of the fleet to see where they might have made different decisions."
