Every other tool
stops at the
finish gun.
SailTac runs the whole race — live instruments on every device aboard, ten-model routing, the start sequence — and then does the part nobody else does. It tells you honestly where the race went, and it remembers, season after season.
Five real courses, in your browser, nothing to install · 30-day trial, no card · Runs alongside whatever you already use · Windows 10 and up
Read the whole report → 8 pages, PDF, 1.1 MB. No email, no install — that's the actual document from 2026 Port Huron → Mackinac, Cove Island course.
The gap
The whole category is open-loop
Every one of these tools gives advice. Not one of them ever finds out whether the advice was any good. The race gets sailed, the beer gets drunk, and the only record of what worked is somebody's memory of it.
TodayA router plots a course.
SailTac replays the route it recommended against the track you actually sailed, and puts a number on the difference.
TodayA forecast service hands you a forecast.
SailTac freezes it at the gun, scores every model against the wind you really got, and keeps that record for the life of the boat.
TodayA crossover chart says which sail to fly.
SailTac checks whether the sail you flew beat the one the chart called for, in the same wind and the same angle.
TodayA tide model predicts current where there are stations.
SailTac solves the current you actually sailed through, every fifteen minutes, as a by-product of checking the paddlewheel — and on water nobody publishes predictions for, that becomes the only current record there is.
That isn't a feature another product ships next quarter. Grading a forecast needs the forecast, the instruments and the finished race log in one place — which is the whole architecture, not a module.
The part nobody else builds
Analytics you can actually argue with
Sailors are rightly skeptical of magic numbers. Every figure in a SailTac debrief carries the evidence it came from, and the report says plainly when two estimates overlap or when something wasn't measurable at all.
A debrief that shows its work
Where did the race actually go? Maneuver losses are measured from the real speed drop through each logged tack, not modelled. Every figure carries the evidence it came from — and when something genuinely can't be measured, it says so instead of inventing a number.
Time lost: sail selection · helming · maneuvers · staysails · routing
The forecast, graded against your water
Not which model is best in general — which one has been closest where you sail, at the lead time you plan from. It won't crown a winner until a paired test says the gap is real, with the race as the unit rather than the hour.
10 models · speed and direction error · skill vs persistence · signed bias
Sails measured like-for-like
Was the staysail worth flying? SailTac compares the same primary sail with and without it, in comparable wind, and shows the delta. Then it keeps a lifetime record for every sail — hours, load against its own rating, and time spent over it.
Per-sail wind and angle envelopes · staysail deltas · lifetime load record
Not just the nav station
Everyone aboard sees it, on the device already in their pocket
Professional nav software is built around one screen below. The trimmer at the winch and the tactician on the rail see none of it. SailTac installs once on the boat's computer and serves the interface to every phone, tablet and laptop on the boat's Wi-Fi — each with the layout that person wants.
One license, the whole boat
Per boat, not per seat. Trimmer, tactician and helm each get their own dashboard from 49 widgets.
Fully offline
Charts, weather and analytics all work with no connectivity once the course is cached.
Built to survive a long race
Auto-reconnecting instruments, append-only logs, crash-resume mid-race, and a health panel that tells you the truth.
Train in the off-season
A built-in simulator lets the crew learn the displays ashore — and it can never be mistaken for live data.
One product, one data model
Plan, race, analyze, improve — then do it again
It compounds because it is one product rather than four. Everything you sail teaches the boat something it uses next time.
Plan
Import your polar from an ORC certificate, fetch ten forecast models, and route the course. Where the models disagree, the leg turns amber or red.
Read more →02Race
Live instruments on every phone and tablet aboard. Marks advance themselves, the race logs at 1 Hz, and it keeps running when the internet doesn't.
Read more →03Analyze
The debrief attributes time lost to sail selection, helming, maneuvers, staysails and routing — each figure carrying its evidence.
Read more →04Improve
Every race feeds a lifetime forecast record and a lifetime record for each sail. The next plan starts better than the last one did.
Read more →- Port Huron → Mackinac, raced 2026
- 250nm
Port Huron → Mackinac, raced 2026
- Position, wind, helm and sail, logged
- 1Hz
Position, wind, helm and sail, logged
- Scored against the wind you actually got
- 10models
Scored against the wind you actually got
- Internet needed once the course is cached
- 0bars
Internet needed once the course is cached
And yes, it routes
Ten models, and an honest view of where they disagree
Six independent global forecasts that cover a whole race, plus four higher-resolution regionals that sharpen the first day or two. Each horizon is handled properly — a 48-hour model isn't quietly blended into hour 60 of your race — and cross-model spread becomes the confidence colour on every leg.
Tidal current comes with it, fetched once from the published stations and cached, so nothing on the racing hot path ever needs a signal. The routing is table stakes in this market and we treat it that way. What isn't table stakes is that afterwards, SailTac tells you which of those ten you should have believed — and what the water actually did while you sailed through it.
Before you switch anything
What SailTac isn't
We'd rather you find this out here than three weeks in. If any of it is a deal-breaker, don't buy — and if it isn't, run SailTac beside what you already have.
- Mac and Windows. There's no iPad or Android build of the boat computer itself — the crew's phones and tablets connect through a browser rather than an app.
- Tidal current is a gridded forecast where NOAA's regional models reach (mostly US bays and the Great Lakes), and interpolated from point stations everywhere else — including every past race, because the grids aren't archived. Interpolating, it can't resolve a channel or an eddy, and it says so on screen rather than drawing a confident arrow.
- Windows may still warn on first run. The installer is signed, but SmartScreen trusts a publisher by download volume and we're new to it.
- No radar, and the charts are tactical reference rather than navigation. SailTac draws NOAA and CHS ENC data and imports your own S-57 cells, but it doesn't replace an approved ECDIS or current paper.
It reads NMEA 0183 over the network, and NMEA 2000 through a gateway — Yacht Devices, Actisense and similar — plus USB and serial. Polars import from an ORC certificate, a CSV or a .pol file, so nothing gets re-keyed. Setup guide.
Pricing
Per boat. Not per seat.
The whole crew is included, on every device, because that's how the product is built. SailTac Racing is $299 a year — less than one race entry fee.
Founding Fleet
First 100 boats$199per boat / year, locked
The first 100 boats lock SailTac Racing at $199/yr for as long as the subscription stays active.Join early, tell us what's missing, and keep the price while you keep racing.
Proof
The founder bet his own race on it first
SailTac was built for a deadline: the 2026 Port Huron-to-Mackinac race, 250 nautical miles up Lake Huron, on the founder's own First 42. It ran the whole race — instruments, routing and full-race logging — and produced the analysis the crew and their tactician are still working from. That report is on this site, unedited — 5th of 15 in class · 23rd of 93 overall.
The classic failure mode of marine software is shipping something that breaks offshore. That's why there's a 72-hour, 259,000-sample stress test in the suite, and why the packaged app gets smoke-tested before every release.
Sail one regatta with it running alongside
Nothing to rip out and nothing to depend on. Keep using what you use, let SailTac log the race, and read the debrief on Sunday night. If it doesn't tell you something you didn't know, you've lost nothing.
Not ready to install anything? Open the live demo or read a real race report.
Questions before you buy? scott@sailtacperformance.com