Motivation
I wrote Plan Your Sail after spending a bunch of time, well, planning a sail – just a small overnight adventure on the San Francisco Bay. SF Bay is paradise for sailors – one of the premiere sailing grounds in the world. Everywhere you look is another magnificent bridge, gorgeous island, idyllic cove, or historic waterfront. The Bay also offers quite challenging conditions, with winds frequently above 20 knots, an 8-foot tidal range, and strong currents of 3 knots or more, all of which must be taken into account when planning a sail.
To illustrate the planning process, let’s take an example: I love sailing to Clipper Cove to anchor overnight. Clipper Cove is a lovely protected harbor on Treasure Island, lying Southeast of my home marina in Sausalito and almost due East of the Golden Gate Bridge.
A sail to Clipper Cove should be made on a flood tide or at slack. Going on an ebb tide means fighting the current. And the entrance to the Cove is quite shallow, so you’ll need to make sure the tide is not too low when you go in and out. That’s a fair number of things to have to check in order to pick a good day to go!
I was looking all that information up on the Internet, and even created a spreadsheet to help me plan. And it got tedious. So, I wrote an app.
Enter Plan Your Sail
Plan Your Sail is simple: It let’s you define a transit (or route) by picking waypoints on a chart. Once defined, you can select your route and pick a date and time, and the App will display the tide and current conditions for each waypoint along the route. The App automatically calculates when you’ll arrive at each waypoint using the boat speed that you set.
The App also let’s you choose the wind direction so that it can tell if you’ll be sailing with the wind or tacking into it, and adjusts your speed-made-good accordingly.
I use the App practically every time I go out. I can quickly tell if it’s a good day to do any of my favorite sails, and I can choose among them based on the conditions. Or, if there’s a specific place I want to go, I can use the App to pick the right day and time.
I find Plan Your Sail super useful, and I hope you do too.