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A sailing log and helm display for boats with no instruments

Cruise mode skips the countdown and the line: just Start. Speed, heading and the daylight left on screen, and every day out mapped in your Logbook.

By Graham Hutchinson, who makes Sail TacticianUpdated 3 min read

We make Sail Tactician, one of the apps in this guide, so we have a stake in the answer. We don't accept free products or payment for placement, and we say where something else is the better buy. Details of other products are from their makers and retailers unless we say we've used them. How we write these

The short version

Who it's for
Day sailors and owners of older keelboats, daysailers and dinghies with few or no instruments.
What you get
Speed, heading, distance and time at the helm; sunset and daylight left before you go; and every day out mapped in your Logbook.
What you need
An iPhone, optionally an Apple Watch, and for a helm display a waterproof case and a bracket. Nothing wired into the boat.
What it costs
Cruise recording and the readouts are free, with the full analysis on your first five sessions.

Sail Tactician is a racing app, but a lot of good sailing has no start gun. Cruise mode drops everything a race needs and keeps what helps on any sail. The full walkthrough is in a sailing log and instrument panel for any boat; this page is the quick version.

Just Start

Choose Cruise as the session type, or make it your default in Settings. There's no countdown, no start line and no tactics. Tap Start and recording begins straight away; tap End when you're back.

Before you set off, the screen shows the day: sunset and the daylight left, worked out on the phone itself so it's there with no signal; the forecast wind, gusts and conditions; and whether GPS has a fix and the battery is ready.

Sail Tactician's cruise screen on iPhone before setting off: a Catalina 36 selected, sunset at 7:01 PM with 6 hours 28 minutes of daylight left, a forecast of 7.2 knots from the south gusting 9, 60 degrees and clear, GPS good, and a Start cruise button
Before you go: sunset, daylight left, the forecast and GPS status.

A display at the helm

A cruise opens on its own Cruise view: speed, heading, distance, elapsed time, and average and top speed, in large type. Mount the iPhone in a waterproof case, turn on Phone Mounted, level it once at the dock, and add heel and trim. On the wrist, the Apple Watch shows its own cruise pages.

The Cruise view on iPhone during a sail: six large tiles showing speed 5.8 knots, heading 0 degrees, distance 0.13 nautical miles, elapsed 1:19, average 5.8 knots and max 5.8 knots, with an End cruise button
The Cruise view: six numbers, readable from the tiller.

Be clear about what it is: speed and distance over the ground from GPS, not through the water, and no depth, charts or routing. It's a speed, heading and heel display and a logbook, not a way to navigate.

Every day out, in the Logbook

Each cruise lands in the Logbook with its track on a map, colored by speed, and the phone keeps your season: how many sails, how far, your longest. Long days are fine: the track is saved less often as the hours go by, and ending always saves everything. Add a wind afterwards and you get the polar, port vs starboard and upwind vs downwind for the day. There's no Coach card on a cruise, because there's no race to grade.

And if you race too, switch the type back to Race and the countdown, the line and the Coach come back, in the same Logbook. See for dinghies or for keelboats.

Questions

Do I need instruments on the boat?

No. Cruise mode uses only the GPS, compass and motion sensors in your iPhone and Apple Watch. Nothing is wired into the boat.

Is Cruise mode free?

Yes. Recording a cruise and the live readouts are free. Each cruise counts toward your first five sessions with the full analysis, like a race; after that, Pro at $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year keeps your whole history open.

Can I use just the Apple Watch?

Yes. The watch records a cruise on its own and syncs it to your iPhone afterwards. It needs watchOS 10.6 or later, and the iPhone iOS 17.6 or later.

Sources

Everything here describes Sail Tactician 3.2 and is taken from the in-app User Guide (Settings → Support → User Guide): Default Session Type, Device Mounting and Session Detail.

What changed

  • First published.

Put a racing instrument on your wrist.

Start line, wind shifts and VMG at a glance, and a coach in your pocket afterwards. Free to download for Apple Watch and iPhone, with the full debrief on your first five races.

Download on the App Store

More guides

Day sailingA sailing log and instrument panel for any boatCruise mode turns the phone and watch you already own into a helm display, with every sail recorded in your Logbook — for day sails, and for boats that never had instruments.About the appWhat Sail Tactician does differentlyPlenty of apps count down to the gun. These are the decisions that make Sail Tactician a different kind of instrument — and the limits we'd rather you heard from us.ComparisonPhone and watch, or a Vakaros? Choosing your start-line instrumentA $1,249 dedicated instrument and a phone in a bracket answer the same question — how far am I from the line? Where the hardware earns its price, and where it doesn't.