This Sunday I did my debut sail with my Stealth F16. The boat was only rigged with the main sail. It was a beautiful day, sunny weather and light winds. The boat was lovely, it reacted very quickly, and it was fast even in very moderate winds. After a while the wind increased, and I could feel the boat really taking off, great! The boat is much faster than my old Hobie 16, but that is no surprise :-) I logged 27 km/h (approx 14.6 knots) on my gps wrist-watch, I think the boat could have gone faster but I was to much of a chicken at that point to sheet the sails harder. I think that is amazing speed with just the mainsail. A cool thing is that I can upload the log file from my watch and view it on Google earth afterwards, to enjoy the ride again (from home) afterwards.

Better still, Upload the track with the map to this forum so we all can enjoy your achievements !

Wouter

What kind of watch is that? Is it one of those Garmin GPS watches? Anyone else tried one?

Suunto M9 is a GPS wrist watch. My wife got me one 1.5 yrs ago fo bday present on the recommendation of one of my sailing friends. Highly highly highly recommend not getting one. You can get a decent regular watch and then a foretrex 101/201 for less total than one M9... hard to program, no start timer, lags several seconds behind actual speed. I don't think you can beat the foretrex for its value and performance

M9 actually has a start timer and in it's start mode it tells you also how long will it take to get to start line with current speed if the line ends have been defined before start (the timer functionality is lot better on M3 though i.e. better/louder sounds and easier controls) and personally I haven't experienced lagging. IMO biggest problem is how long will battery last, if GPS is tracked most then the battery will end in about 3 hours, I suspect that you have longer frequency and thus you have some lag.

IMO all it's problems are related to small size though, foretex is lot bigger hence bigger battery, easier to get hardware in (i.e. cheaper to make) and easier controls.

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Valtteri

I forgot about that function actually.. it will tell you if you will be over early. Unfortunately by the time you have set all this stuff up your finger hurts from pressing the small buttons so many times. I think it can tell you which side of the line is favored after you have set up the wind direction, and marked each end of the starting line but is painful to set up. Maybe I will try to play with it againa nd see if I can get some more functionality out of it.
Yes, the life of the battery is short and the cover comes off really easily (came off when a line came over the front. It dissappeared and now i have epoxy holding the wire onto the body.

The Velocitek S10 seems pretty good. A lot of the mothies are using them.

No physical buttons, only LDRs that activate when you put your finger over them.

Try GPS action replay for analysing your performance afterwards. Yeah, viewing on google earth is good, you can see a lot about where you race. You can see the effect the land has on the wind angle and many other things...

I have a Suunto x9i, it seems to work ok. I get a very good gps signal when I´m out on the water and it has a lot of different functions.

I´ll see if i can upload a log file later.