Settings

Sailor

Your name. It's attached only to races you Share with another sailor, so their app can label you in a comparison. It's never written into GPX, CSV, KML or TCX exports, and it syncs across your devices via iCloud.

Your sail number lives on the boat, not here — a number only means something alongside a class, and many sailors race more than one boat. Set it under My Boats below. (A sail number saved against your name in an older version moved onto your selected boat automatically.)

Boat

Your boat class sets the upwind and downwind VMG angles, and with them the no-sail zone. 50+ presets ship with the app, each with angles from published polars and class documentation:

• High-Performance Skiff — 49er, 29er, Moth, WASZP, Musto Skiff, I-14, 505
• Olympic Dinghy — ILCA 4/6/7, 470, Finn, Europe
• Scow — MC, C, E, A, M-20, X
• Club Dinghy — Optimist, Sunfish, 420, RS Feva, RS Aero, Topper, Lightning, Flying Scot, Snipe
• Sportboat — J/70, Melges 24, Melges 20, VX One, SB20
• Keelboat — J/24, J/105, J/111, Etchells, Sonar, Star, Dragon, Flying Fifteen, Grand Surprise
• Cruiser/Racer — Beneteau First 36.7, Catalina 22/36, Hunter 33, X-35
• Multihull — Hobie 16, Hobie Wave, Nacra 17, Formula 18, Dart 16

There is one Boat Class screen, reached from Settings → Boat or from the Boat screen in race Setup. Pull down to search by class name, category, or a saved boat's sail number.

My Boats. A preset is enough to go racing. Saving a boat of your own adds a sail number and rigging notes: tap + on a preset row, or Add Custom Boat if yours isn't listed. A boat saved from a preset starts with the class's angles, hull length and category; set the angles yourself if you want to dial them in (upwind 25–60°, downwind 120–175°).

• Sail number — labels races you share ("MC Scow · USA 4732"). Each race is labelled with the boat it was sailed on, so switching boats doesn't rewrite your history.
• Rigging notes — free text: shroud tension and rake by wind range, a pasted tuning guide, a reminder about a new sail. Return starts a new line. They print in full on the Boat step of race Setup while you rig, and are never attached to a shared race. Written and read on the iPhone.

Saved boats sync between iPhone and watch and can be created or edited on either. Edit or delete with the pencil.

Preset angles are for moderate wind (8–14 knots). Sail wider in light air and higher in a breeze — save a boat with your own angles to match your conditions.

Theme

Settings → Display → Theme: System, Light, or Dark (the default). Dark is easier at night and lighter on an OLED battery; Light often reads better in sun through polarized sunglasses. It's set per device, so a bow-mounted phone can run light while the one in your pocket runs dark. The watch is always dark.

If the screen blacks out at certain angles with sunglasses on, that's the display's polarizer against your lenses, not the theme — rotate the phone 90°.

Units

Settings → Units holds Speed (knots, MPH — the default, or km/h) and Distance (kilometers & meters, nautical miles & meters, nautical miles & feet, or miles & feet). Both apply everywhere, watch included.

Default Session Type

The type new sessions start as — Race, Training, or Cruise. Change it per session on the hub, or afterwards from the session detail. Under Settings → Race on the iPhone and Settings → Session on the watch.

Cruise is sailing without a start or a course, and both devices adapt to it:

• Today on the water. Where a race shows its countdown, a cruise shows the day: sunset and the daylight left (worked out on the device, so it's there with no signal), the forecast wind speed, gusts, temperature and conditions (fetched by whichever device you're holding — a cellular watch gets its own), and whether you're ready to record: GPS and battery. The phone adds your season so far — cruises, distance and your longest. On the watch, GPS and battery sit beside CRUISE at the top; if GPS is slow to lock or the battery is low, that line turns amber and says so. With no connection the forecast says "No forecast" and everything else stays.
• No countdown. The timer becomes a single Start that records straight away, with one beep and buzz if your countdown sounds and haptics are on. No gun is recorded, so every number covers the whole outing.
• No start line. The Line column, Pin and Boat captures, favored end, distance and time to the line, and the over-the-line warning are gone. Wind stays — the polar and VMG cards after the sail are measured against it — and Boat takes the Line column's place.
• No live tactics. No VMG, target heading, tack/gybe cue, no-sail zone or wind-shift buzz: VMG means nothing without a mark or a heading to make good.
• Its own screen. A cruise opens on a Cruise view — speed, heading, distance, time, average and top speed — without you reconfiguring anything. See Metric Views below, and Cruise Metrics on the watch.
• Long days are fine. The track is saved every 30 seconds for the first hour, then every minute, then every two minutes after three hours, so a long sail doesn't spend its battery re-saving a track that has grown large. At most the last two minutes are at risk if something goes wrong, and End always saves everything. On the watch the compass also eases off for the whole cruise, since nothing on a cruise screen needs it.

Cue Final Seconds

How early the per-second countdown cues begin: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 or 30 seconds, called as spoken numbers or beeps, with a long beep at the gun. In voice mode every whole minute from ten down is spoken too ("three minutes"); in beeps mode a minute mark is a long beep. The same values are offered in iPhone Settings, Setup's Timer screen, and on the watch. For silence, set Audio Style → Silent — this setting is how early the cues start, not whether they happen.

No-Sail Zone

The red arc either side of the wind you can't sail in. Its edge is your boat's upwind VMG angle, so there's no separate setting: change the boat (or a custom boat's angles) and the zone follows on both devices.

Device Mounting

Phone Mounted to Boat lives in Setup → Phone on the Sail tab, and in Settings → Phone & Mounting — the same screen, reached from wherever you happen to be. It sits in Setup because you level a phone at the moment you clamp it to the bracket, which is at the dock with the setup list already open.

Turn it on when the iPhone is fixed to the boat in a waterproof case. It enables:

• Heel and trim — live, in degrees. Heel shows as a magnitude on screen, since you can see which side you're on; the recording keeps the side for the Heel chart. The session summary adds Avg Heel and Max Heel tiles with how tightly you held the average. They read N/A on sessions recorded without a mounted phone.
• Consistency — how steady heel and trim were over the last 30 seconds.
• Capsize and knockdown detection — from the motion sensors. Off when the phone is in a pocket, where the motion is yours rather than the hull's. The watch never detects them.
• Race summary auto-close — the post-race summary closes after 20 seconds and returns to the start screen, ready for the next race in back-to-back racing. Tap anywhere on it to keep it open.
• Keep Screen On During Race (on by default) — the phone doesn't auto-lock while the app is open. iOS can't wake a locked phone from an app, so open Sail Tactician before your start.
• Full brightness during a race — from the countdown to the finish, then your previous level is restored.
• GPS Source — which device's GPS the phone records: iPhone (the default) or Apple Watch, if it has the better receiver. It falls back to the phone if the watch feed drops.

Mount with the screen facing up and the top of the phone toward the bow.

Sensor calibration (Setup → Phone on the Sail tab, or Settings → Phone & Mounting — the same screen either way, when mounted). A mount is never quite flat or square:

• The bubble is live from the moment Phone Mounted is on, so you can watch it while you position the bracket. Before you zero it reads Mount angle — the mount's true tilt, so a reclined bracket really does read 30-40°, and that is not a fault. After you zero it reads Off level, which is the residual the fine-tune works against.
• Level Sensors (Zero Heel & Trim) — with the boat as level as you can get it, tap once. The phone's mounted orientation becomes zero, at any mount angle: reclined, landscape, or a crooked bracket. Then watch the live Now reading and nudge the Heel and Trim fine-tune steppers (±0.5°) until level reads flat. The easiest true zero is the boat sitting unweighted on its dolly. Clear Calibration returns to raw readings. Positive heel is starboard-down; positive trim is bow-up.
• Screen faces the bow — leave it off when you read the phone looking forward. Turn it on if the phone is mounted the other way round, or port and starboard swap. Check: heel toward starboard and watch the bubble; if it runs the wrong way, flip this. No need to level again.
• Bow alignment — the app learns how far the mount is aimed off the bow while you sail, and remembers it. It needs both tacks first, because leeway points the bow a few degrees to windward of your track on each tack. Until then the row reads "learning". Move the bracket and it notices and says so; Re-learn Bow Alignment starts over.
• A bubble level shows the residual offset once calibrated, turning green at your calibrated level.

Calibrated on an earlier version? Level once more. Heel now comes from gravity rather than the phone's own orientation, so a tack can no longer show up as a spike of heel that never happened. Your fine-tune values are kept.

Racing from the watch with the phone as your display. With Phone Mounted on and a watch paired, starting the countdown on the watch also starts it on the phone: the phone becomes the big race screen and the watch the remote. Pause, sync, reset and end on the watch all drive the phone, and both count to the same gun. The phone records the single session with its own sensors, and your heart rate streams from the watch onto the race screen and into the saved track.

• Your watch's setup is what races. The watch hands the phone its wind, boat class and start line once, at countdown start. Change any of them afterwards and you need to reset and restart the countdown to push the new values across.
• The watch's timer screen shows a chip: green Controls iPhone when the phone app is linked; orange iPhone not connected when it isn't reachable (open it), in which case the watch records on its own. During the countdown a dot turns green once the phone confirms it's following.
• To record on the watch for a race without changing the phone's setting, turn off Settings → Mounted iPhone → Control iPhone on the watch.

Recording Rate

A ceiling, not a target, and iPhone only. The phone logs each GPS fix as it arrives and skips any that come sooner than the rate you pick. It can't make the GPS deliver faster, and at high accuracy an iPhone commonly delivers about 1 Hz.

Every session reports the rate it really got, under the track point count on the session detail ("Recorded at about 1.0 Hz"). If you pick 5 Hz and keep seeing ~1 Hz, that's your phone's GPS, not a fault — drop the setting back and save the battery. The watch always records at about 1 Hz.

Very long high-rate sessions (over three hours at 10 Hz) are thinned evenly to fit, and the detail screen says "Stored at reduced resolution". Nothing is dropped silently.

Black Box

Black Box gives you the start timer and nothing else.

The countdown runs exactly as normal. At the gun the screen changes to a single page: elapsed time, a red recording dot, and End. There is no distance to line, no time to line, no favored end and no race views, on either device. Ending returns you straight to the start timer, ready for the next race — there is no post-race summary in the way.

Everything is still recorded. Your track, speed, heart rate and maneuvers go to the Logbook exactly as they do in any other session, and the full analysis is waiting there afterwards.

The Logbook and Analytics disappear for the length of a session — from the moment the countdown starts until you end it, on both devices. Reading last week's tack loss on the way to the line is the thing Black Box exists to prevent, and a tab is the easiest screen in the app to reach. They come straight back when the session ends, which is when you need them: that is where you add the wind and the marks.

Setup is shorter too: the wind and marks steps are skipped, so the fastest path is open the app, set the minutes, Start.

That has one cost worth knowing about, and it differs by device:

• On iPhone, the app still fetches the forecast wind for your position in the background, at no cost in taps. VMG, your tack and gybe counts and the polar diagram all survive.
• On Apple Watch there is no forecast. A Black Box session recorded on the watch alone has no wind, so its VMG chart, polar angle line, port vs starboard and upwind/downwind split are all unavailable until you add one.

You can add all of it afterwards, on the iPhone. Open the session, and from its map set the wind, drop the windward mark, or place either end of the start line. The analysis recomputes each time. Placing the windward mark is the best of these: the app measures the wind from your start to that mark, which is far more accurate than guessing it from your track.

Black Box is free, and it stays on until you turn it off. Switch it on in Settings → Race, or in Setup → Layout from the Sail tab. It follows you to your other devices through iCloud.

Wind Shift Tracking

Both devices refine your wind from the courses you sail. Capture the wind as usual — that's the seed. After a few minutes of beating on both tacks the estimate takes over the live numbers: favored end, VMG target, no-sail zone, laylines, tack/gybe counts. The wind saved with the session stays the one you set, so post-race analysis is anchored to what you called.

On the iPhone the readout sits under the favored-end bar during the countdown, with a tag saying where the number came from:

• FORECAST — WeatherKit, for a wide grid square; often 20–30° out at a lake or in a shoreline breeze.
• SET — the wind you typed or pointed to.
• TRACKED — the app's own estimate from your beats. Trust this one once it appears.
• WATCH — the watch is controlling a mounted phone, and both show its number.

Add the Wind Shift cell to a race view to keep it on screen after the gun. It shows the live wind; how far it has moved since you set it (R 8° / L 12° — which side of the course has been paying); and LIFT 6° or HEAD 9° against your own average on this tack, the number that tells you when to tack. The watch also taps you twice when a shift of 8° or more settles in — upward for right, downward for left (Settings → Wind Settings → Shift Haptic).

What it won't do:

• Invent a wind. Without a capture you get nothing.
• Wander more than 30° from what you set (further from a forecast, which is a weaker start). If the wind has really moved further, re-capture it.
• Learn from reaching, running, or anything under about 1.5 knots. LIFT / HEAD only appears upwind.

It warms up over the first few minutes and shows -- until then. Starting a new countdown clears it. Turn it off under Settings → Race → Track Wind Shifts (iPhone) or Settings → Wind Settings → Track Shifts (watch) — worth doing when motoring between courses or drifting in a dying breeze.

Support

• User Guide — this document, shipped with the app so it works without signal. Chapters are collapsed; the search field matches sections, each labelled with its chapter.
• Send Feedback — pick Bug, Idea, or Something else, write, and send. It works offline: the report is kept and sent by itself the next time you open the app with a connection ("Saved" rather than "Sent"). Your app and iOS version, watch pairing, iCloud status and a few settings go with it — tap What gets sent to see exactly what. No tracks, race data, boat details or names are included. Your email is required so we can confirm the report and reply; it's remembered after the first time. If a report can't be delivered at all, the app offers to email support@sailtactician.com instead.
• About — version and build, the story behind the app, and a link to sailtactician.com.