The watch is the primary on-water interface, built for a glance. Settings → Instructions on the watch walks through a race day in a few short steps.
Timer screen
The watch opens on the race timer. Set the countdown with −/+ in whole minutes; at 0 the key reads Start now and recording begins with no countdown. With Cruise chosen there are no minutes at all — just Start — and the race pages give way to Settings → Cruise Metrics (speed, heading, distance, average and top speed, heart rate, wind and calories by default); Race Metrics are the pages for races and training. Swipe for Settings, Logbook and Analytics. During a race the metric pages and an End Race screen replace the timer.
Race Setup, opened from the timer screen, gathers what you set most often as tiles — Wind (tap to lock your current heading), Type, and the Pin and Boat marks — with your boat class on a full-width row. Choices persist as you make them.
Start line. Sail past the pin and tap Pin, then past the boat and tap Boat. Each reads Captured once set; tap a captured tile again to drop it. Capture the line during your practice sail — it stays set until you clear it. During the countdown the timer screen shows the favored end, DTL and Burn beneath the clock; without Pro it shows an Unlock with Pro button in their place.
Wind. Point to Wind in Settings and the Wind tile in Race Setup read the same compass and record a true bearing. Without a GPS fix the compass can only give magnetic north; the capture still works and the tile says so.
Transport keys during the countdown: red ✕ cancels the sequence (after a confirmation), orange ↻ syncs to the nearest minute, blue ❙❙ pauses and green ▶ resumes. The faces are filled so they read in sun.
Race pages show VMG target and correction with a TACK / GYBE cue, SOG, COG, speed, distance, heart rate, and tack/gybe counts, on pages you configure under Settings → Metrics Display.
When TACK shows. On a beat, TACK means you've had to bear away at least 5° from the course you've been sailing on this tack over the last few minutes, and held it for about 15 seconds — a header. It is measured against your own course, not your class's polar angle, so a boat sailing in the groove isn't told to tack just because it makes a few degrees of leeway. GYBE means you've been sailing at least 5° hotter than your class's run angle. Neither shows on a reach.
Black Box on the watch. With Settings → Black Box on, the timer screen shows the clock alone — no favored end, no DTL, no Burn — and Race Setup drops the Wind, Pin and Boat tiles. The readiness strip carries your session type and your boat instead of Wind and Line — on the iPhone as well. The boat class is the one setting the mode still leans on, because its polar angles are what the post-race analysis is measured against. The Logbook and Analytics tabs are gone for the length of a session and return when it ends. At the gun the only page is elapsed time, a recording dot and End, and ending returns you to the timer with no summary. The session records in full, but the watch has no forecast to fall back on, so it saves with no wind: add one afterwards on the iPhone, from the session's map. See Black Box under Settings.
Start line after the gun (Pro)
Add the Start Line metric to a race page and DTL stays live after the gun. The cell turns red and reads OCS while you're on the course side, and says Beyond pin / Beyond boat past an end. Burn reads -- after the start — there's no countdown left to burn against. DTL, TTL and burn are also available as separate metrics.
Units
Settings → Units has two pickers: Speed (knots, mph, km/h) and Distance (kilometers & meters, nautical miles & meters, nautical miles & feet, or miles & feet). The first unit is for distance sailed, the second for short distances like the distance to the line. Until you pick one, Distance follows your speed unit: knots reads in nautical miles & feet, mph in miles & feet, km/h in kilometers & meters.
Wind shifts (Pro)
The watch tracks the breeze from the courses you sail and taps you when it moves — see Wind Shift Tracking under Settings for the readout, the haptic and the limits. Add the Wind Shift metric to a metrics page under Settings → Metrics Display; during the countdown the tracked wind works quietly behind the favored-end bar.
Action Button (Apple Watch Ultra)
Set it once in the watch's Settings → Action Button: set Action to Workout, App to Sail Tactician, and First Press to Start countdown. After that a press follows the race:
- Before a race — starts the countdown at your default minutes (or the race straight away if the default is 0), as the session type set under Settings → Session.
- During the countdown — syncs the clock to the nearest minute.
- During the race — opens the End screen and asks. A press never ends a race by itself, so a sleeve can't end a recording.
The watch says which it did. The same actions are available to Shortcuts and Siri.
Sessions on the watch
Open a session and tap ••• for Rename, Change Type, Set / Change Boat, Edit Results & Notes, Force Sync to iPhone, and Delete Session. Trim and clip are iPhone-only. The Logbook and Analytics share a filter button for date range, type and boat; custom date ranges are iPhone-only. The Logbook's filter adds Sync: Not Yet Synced lists only the races your iPhone hasn't confirmed. Beyond your free five, locked sessions carry a PRO badge and a banner says how many are waiting.
The post-race Summary shows time, distance, average and max speed, tacks, gybes and capsizes, battery used and per hour, a Results & Notes row, and the analysis cards — speed, polar, VMG, port vs starboard, maneuver efficiency, up/down wind — with the wind-dependent ones appearing when a wind was set.
Water Lock
Settings → Water Lock, for every session type:
- Never — swipe up from the bottom and tap the drop icon if you need it.
- When Timer Starts — locks the instant you press Start. For really wet days.
- When Countdown Ends — stays interactive through the countdown so you can sync with the committee, then locks at the gun.
Battery
GPS stays at full accuracy from the countdown to the end of the race, so the track never has holes. The compass eases off when your wrist is down and the screen has dimmed, everything steps down when nothing is running, and leaving the app stops the sensors unless a race is recording. The post-race summary shows what the race cost.
Syncing to the iPhone
Watch sessions transfer to the iPhone automatically as a compressed file, and are marked sent only when the phone confirms, so an interrupted transfer retries itself.
If one doesn't appear:
- Open it on the watch and tap Force Sync to iPhone. It reads Sent to iPhone once delivered; Re-sync to iPhone sends it again.
- While a session is on its way, its page reads Sending to iPhone…, or Waiting for iPhone… when the phone is out of reach. A waiting session goes by itself when the phone is back in range; you don't need to keep tapping.
- If the iPhone has the session but it's wrong — cut short, say — Re-sync to iPhone replaces the iPhone's copy with the watch's, even one you've moved to the Recycle Bin. Anything you added on the iPhone, such as a wind or notes, is replaced too.
- Keep the Sail Tactician app open on the iPhone, with both devices signed into iCloud.
- "iPhone couldn't read this session — use Force Sync to retry" means that one session stopped retrying after arriving damaged or failing several times; everything else keeps syncing. Force Sync clears the block.
A race permanently deleted on the iPhone won't come back on its own at the next sync. If the watch still has it, Force Sync from the watch brings it back deliberately.