Lots of apps count down to the gun. When we built Sail Tactician, we kept making the same kind of decision: show the sailor how sure we are, measure instead of assume, and make the race teach something afterwards. These are the decisions that make it a different kind of instrument — on race day and on a quiet Sunday sail — and, at the end, the things it doesn't do.
One instrument, not three apps
Most racers end up with a timer on the wrist, something else on the phone, and a third service for the debrief. Sail Tactician is one thing across the Apple Watch and iPhone. The line you ping before the start is the line your start is judged against afterwards; the wind you set seeds the live tracking and anchors the analysis.
Mount an iPhone and the watch becomes its remote: start the countdown on your wrist and the phone starts with it, becomes the big screen, and records the one session with your heart rate streamed from the watch. On an Apple Watch Ultra, the Action button starts the countdown, then syncs it to the nearest minute, then — during the race — asks before ending it. A sleeve can't end a race by accident.
A wind that says where it came from
Every tactical number — favoured end, VMG, laylines, lifts and headers — is only as good as the wind it's measured against, and most apps don't tell you how good that is. Sail Tactician labels it. The live wind readout carries a tag: FORECAST, SET (you pointed the bow at it or typed it in), TRACKED (refined from the courses you've sailed) or WATCH (sent from your wrist). We tell you plainly that a forecast is for a grid square and can be 20–30° off on your bit of water.
The tracking itself is conservative by design. It starts from the wind you gave it, learns only from upwind sailing above about 1.5 knots, and never wanders more than 30° from your setting. It never invents a wind from nothing. After the race, the same honesty carries through: a wind worked out from where you placed the windward mark is labelled mark, one inferred from your track est, and any coaching finding that rests on a guess is marked APPROX.
Coaching priced in seconds
A debrief that lists twenty statistics leaves you to work out which mattered. Sail Tactician's Coach puts every finding into one currency — seconds lost, at your own boat speed — and leads with the two that cost most. A layline overstood by 80 metres and a run of slow tacks are suddenly comparable. Anything under about ten seconds never leads, and being over the line at the gun always does.
Each upwind leg is drawn inside its tacking cone — the water between the two laylines — so an overstand or a banged corner is something you can see, not just a number. And the Coach says what went well, not only what didn't: a clean start, the beat you sailed closest to ideal, tacks that held their speed.
Measured, not assumed
A lot of sailing analytics quietly compare you with a number from a polar table. We'd rather measure what you did:
- Extra distance on a beat is judged against the angle you sailed that leg, not your class's published angle — so it means "distance lost to the route you took", not "you aren't a pro".
- A big speed loss in a tack is judged against your own typical tack in that race, not a fixed percentage.
- Tacks are timed from the moment the bow crossed the wind, not when software noticed, so a quick tack and a slow one read differently.
- Your sailed angles are medians on each tack, not the single best moment — one lucky GPS fix doesn't become your "best upwind angle".
- The recording rate it reports is the rate it actually got. Ask an iPhone for 10 Hz and you'll be told if it delivered closer to 1.
Works with the watch you already race with
You don't need an Apple Watch to get the debrief. Sail Tactician imports races recorded on a Garmin, COROS, Suunto, Polar or Wahoo (FIT), from Strava and most other apps (GPX or TCX), from a Vakaros (VKX, with the gun and line), and from instrument logs (NMEA). Garmin's space-saving "Smart" recording is filled to one point a second, speed and course are worked out from the track when the file has none, and the odd impossible speed spike is caught. Imports are in beta, and every imported race has a button to report a problem. How to import a race.
Racing with less on screen
Some sailors want every number; some classes allow very few; some racers just want to sail. Two features cover the other end of the dial:
- Class-compliant lock fixes the race screen to a single page you've built, so nothing can be swiped to mid-race.
- Black Box shows only the clock during the race, and still records everything for the debrief. It's free.
What your class actually permits is for your class rules and race committee to say; we describe what the features do and leave that call to them.
Not only for racing: day sails, and boats with no instruments
Plenty of good boats have no electronics at all — an older keelboat with a compass and a tell-tale, a dinghy, a daysailer. Sail Tactician's Cruise mode turns the phone and watch you already own into an instrument panel and a logbook for them.
- An instrument panel. A Cruise view opens with speed, heading, distance, time, and average and top speed, laid out to read from the helm. Mount the iPhone and add heel and trim. Build your own screens from the same readouts.
- The day at a glance. Before you set off: sunset and the daylight left (worked out on the device, so it's there with no signal), the forecast wind, gusts and conditions, and whether GPS and battery are ready.
- Every sail in your Logbook. One tap starts recording — no countdown, no line. Every sail lands in the Logbook with its track, and the phone keeps your season so far: how many sails, how far, your longest.
- Long days are fine. The track is saved more sparingly as the hours go by, so an all-day sail doesn't spend its battery re-saving itself.
The instrument readouts are free. A cruise counts as one of your five free sessions with the full analysis, like a race. More in a sailing log and instrument panel for any boat.
Your data stays yours
Sail Tactician has no account to create and no server of ours that your races go to. They sync between your devices through your own private iCloud. There are no analytics or advertising SDKs in the app. Sign in with Apple is optional and nothing needs it. When you share a race with another sailor, it goes as a file you send — your name and boat attached so they can tell you apart, your heart rate never.
On the free tier every race is recorded and kept in full. Your first five races include the whole debrief; after that, new races stay locked until you subscribe, and nothing is ever deleted — resubscribe and the whole history opens again.
What it doesn't do
We'd rather you heard these from us:
- No Android, and no app on Garmin or COROS watches. Those races come in by import, so you get the debrief but not the live start line on the wrist.
- No live input from boat instruments — no NMEA 2000 or Bluetooth wind feed during a race.
- No marks captured during the race. You drop the windward mark on the map afterwards; offset marks, gates and course templates are planned.
- No charts, routing or weather routing. Use a chartplotter or PredictWind for those.
- No downwind coaching findings yet, and beat coaching, training scoring and imports are labelled beta.
- A wrist or phone GPS is about 1 Hz. It won't match a 25 Hz instrument in the last seconds before the gun — see phone and watch vs a Vakaros.
- Comparing boats needs both to use Sail Tactician, and fleet-wide analysis is better done in a tool built for it.
Questions
Is Sail Tactician free?
Yes, to download and race with. The free tier includes the countdown, compass and live speed and heading, and the full debrief on your first five races. Pro — $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year, with the first month free — adds the start line, VMG, wind-shift tracking, every race in your history, all training drills, and race comparison.
Does it work without an Apple Watch?
Yes. The iPhone alone records races and has the full set of race-day tools; the watch adds the glance on your wrist. And races from other watches can be imported.
Do I need an account?
No. There's no Sail Tactician account. Races sync through your own iCloud.
Sources
Everything here describes Sail Tactician 3.2 and is taken from the in-app User Guide, which ships with the app (Settings → Support → User Guide).
What changed
- First published. Prices and specifications checked against makers' and retailers' sites.
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