Sailing Simulator: Home

Welcome to the virtual sailor weather routing server

After many sleepless nights playing the Volvo Ocean Race game, and spending too much time fooling around with possible tracks, missing few low-pressure systems and so on, I decided to challenge my programming skills instead and try writing automatic weather routing software. In the end that is why we have computers - to automate tedious tasks. And the real sailors and racers use such software too. It turned out to work pretty well, so I decided to show it to the world, hence this site.
This tool should be able to answer the question "What is the fastest way of sailing my virtual boat from point A to point B, given the current weather forecast. I believe it does it as accurately as possible.

What can it do?	Simulator Limitations
It should be able to predict your boat position in the next few hours pretty well and plot the best route if you know exactly where are you going.	This is beta version. There will be bugs and glitches. It may or may not help you get better results. The weather forecast for > 12h will change with time, so what looks like the best direction right now could be terribly wrong in a day, so the optimizer will be wrong in some cases, and it can not help you with long-term strategy too much. Do not attempt to use for real navigation. It might be possible to modify the code for use in real conditions, right now it is based on the game logic - discrete 1 degree wind squares and 12-hour forecast updates. Using it in the real world would require a bit more data points too, like currents, tides, waves, real boat polars and so on.

What can it do?

Simulator Limitations

It should be able to predict your boat position in the next few hours pretty well and plot the best route if you know exactly where are you going.

This is beta version. There will be bugs and glitches. It may or may not help you get better results.

The weather forecast for > 12h will change with time, so what looks like the best direction right now could be terribly wrong in a day, so the optimizer will be wrong in some cases, and it can not help you with long-term strategy too much.

Do not attempt to use for real navigation. It might be possible to modify the code for use in real conditions, right now it is based on the game logic - discrete 1 degree wind squares and 12-hour forecast updates. Using it in the real world would require a bit more data points too, like currents, tides, waves, real boat polars and so on.