that little action cam we use to film our f18 sailing actually has an in-built gps unit. obviously the data that captures can be used to calculate all sorts of interesting metrics: course, distance, heading and of course also speed. given the formula 18 catamarans are anything but slow that is definitely interesting. sadly the application that came with the camera isn’t able to handle the large files, but we managed to find another solution that can – so here you go: last weekend’s edit with telemetry overlay!
a few observations: our self-tacking jib unfortunately isn’t as self-taking as we’d like it to be. a few drops of oil on the traveller car bearing balls might help, but we’ll see if these guys need replacing. during the first kite run we let the jib off too much, and it started backwinding – not perfect for those high-speed runs, but we still made 14 knots (about 26 kmh); we made sure not to easy the sheet quite as much later on. we also suspect that we have our weight a bit too far back; while that may be safe and help us avoid pitchpoling (with the obligatory flight around the mast for nat) it increases drag which in turn costs speed. nat will have to move a bit further forward in those lighter conditions. and the whiskers need tightening, as anthony correctly observed. on the upwind we did better, especially when we pulled up the daggerboards a bit, even though in the section shown in the edit we were pinching a bit to make the mark.
otherwise, as previously stated, we are making progress.