Dear SYOA Members,

The 2025 Yawl magazine features an article on race tracking that introduces a change to the tracking app that the yawl fleet will be using this season at the Yawl Training weekend and also for club races and open meetings.

In summary, over the past couple of years we have been using eStela, but due to the significant cost of this commercial app, this year we will be trialling a new app called Sailchart which will be free to the Yawl fleet. Sailchart not only captures the race tracks and boat speed using a smartphone app (like eStela), but can also measure tacking angles, speed change over a tack and boat heel angle.

Last seaons’s race data from the open events and regattas has been loaded into Sailchart to help those who tracked last year familiarise themselves with the app. If you tracked last season, you will receive a separate email after the first session with your login details for Sailchart since your accounts have already been registered to record last season’s races.

We will be holding a couple of online sessions to introduce Sailchart and answer any questions that may arise. Everyone interested in tracking is encouraged to attend, especially if you are attending the Training weekend. For more information, visit https://sailchart.org

After this session you are encouraged to install the app and review last season’s races on the Sailchart website and gather any questions for the Q&A session.

The meetings will use GotoMeeting.

Best wishes,

Mike Knowles and  Darius Panahy