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A Tool for Long-Distance Yacht Racing and Cruising PDF Print E-mail

Bluewater Racing is a free program that provides strategic tools to help you win long-distance sailboat races. 

  • Plan your route on a graphical chart-based interface.
  • View boat performance data (polar charts).
  • View weather forecasts (GriBs). 
  • Use performance and wind data to compute how long it will take to sail your route. 
  • Ask the program to plan the fastest route for you.
  • Track competitors. 
  • Interface to your GPS. 
  • View NOAA charts in BSB format
  • Make your own charts from any digital image.
Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 December 2009 09:43
Learn more
 
Announcing Version 1.20 PDF Print E-mail
Monday, 25 January 2010 00:14

Bluewater Racing version 1.20 is available for download.  Version 1.20 upgrades the support for Gridded Binary weather files to be more robust and to provide custom support for a larger collection of weather parameters, including wave data from the Wave Watch 3 model, temperature and cloud cover.  As always, it provides best-effort display of any weather parameter from WMO Parameter Table Version 2.

 Version 1.20 also includes a number of bug fixes.

Bluewater Racing includes support for Grib files, competition management, route optimization, and GPS connection.  A NMEA instrument panel and and support for currents in the performance and optimization calculations is in development, as well as support for the NOAA vector chart format. 

 
 
Bluewater Racing Philosophy E-mail

Bluewater Racing  exclusively uses high-quality, free, publicly available data from NOAA and various universities for its charting and weather routing functions.  This has two advantages.  First, you never have to pay extra money.  If you're a U.S. taxpayer, you already paid for this data.  Second, many race committees disallow the use of proprietary commercial data during the actual race.  With Bluewater, you always get to share in that Corinthian spirit.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 24 November 2009 21:25
 
World Magnetic Model for 2010-2015 Released PDF Print E-mail
Tuesday, 29 December 2009 09:30

The National Geophysical Data Center of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released its new World Magnetic Model. 

Bluewater Racing uses the World Magnetic Model to compute magnetic declination at any point on the globe.  (Magnetic declination is the difference between true north and magnetic north.)  The model data is stored in the file WMM.COF. Since the magnetic poles are in constant (but slow) motion, the magnetic model is recalculated by NOAA every five years.  Each five-year period is referred to as an epoch. The current epoch spans January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2014. 

If you have downloaded a copy of Bluewater Racing at any time in the current epoch, you automatically have the most up-to-date version of WMM.COF.  If you downloaded a copy during a previous epoch, the program is probably complaining, and you should download the current WMM.COF from our download center into the top level Bluewater Racing directory.  (Under Windows, this is normally c:\Program Files\bluewater). You may also get a copy of the file directly from NOAA.

 
Last Updated on Thursday, 31 December 2009 01:06
 
Barb-a-loot wins 2008 PacCup division PDF Print E-mail
Wednesday, 30 July 2008 21:12
Andrew Hamilton drove his Moore 24 Barb-a-loot to victory in Division 2 of the 2008 Pacific Cup, using Bluewater Racing.  Barb-a-loot finished 7th in the overall fleet of 59 boats.  Since we're not trying to make money off this software, we're not sure why we're trumpeting this fact.  Anyway, Andy writes: "the program is great, was a huge help and kept me busy." Medium-high praise indeed!
 
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