Has technology ruined offshore racing?

How routing software turned offshore racing into a different game. Report by Yacht Racing Performance Coach Stuart Greenfield:

It was off the Outer Hebrides, August 2022, during the Sevenstar Round Britain and Ireland Race. We were on Morning After, my rebuilt S&S 34 from 1967, working our way around the top of Scotland, and the next big decision was at the Butt of Lewis before making course towards Muckle Flugga, up at the northern edge of Shetland.

It is the sort of place that concentrates the mind. The land is running out. The sea feels bigger. The weather has room to do what it wants, and the decision is no longer theoretical — get it wrong there and you can spend a long time paying for it.

Our weather intelligence setup was, by modern standards, comically analogue. A satellite phone connected to a mobile phone and portable router — which had to have a clear view of the sky to work at all — pulled GRIB files down into the onboard PC running Seatrack. Old software, certainly, but the mathematics behind it was doing the same fundamental job as the routing engines in Expedition and Adrena today: take the weather, take the boat’s predicted performance, run the options, find the quickest way through the problem.

Alongside the screen there was a barometer — still, in my view, the single best instrument for anticipating a weather change — the BBC Radio 4 shipping forecast on longwave, and a small black box that had started life as a fax machine and downloaded forecast data onto what amounted to a tiny green-screen display. Not exactly a professional weather routing operation. Then again, I am not exactly young. We used what we had, and we used all of it. – Full report