Recording a sail
Open the Track tab, press record, and sail. Recording continues with the screen off, so the track has no gaps. When you stop, the sail is saved with its full instrument history and you can scrub back through it on a map with the data replayed beside you.
Recording one
Open Track and press record
Before you leave the dock, so the whole sail is in one session.
Put the phone away if you want
Recording continues in the background. iOS shows its location indicator while it does.
Press stop when you are in
The session is saved with everything it captured.
Give it a name
Swipe the session right in the list to rename it. “Wednesday Twilight” beats “12 Aug 2026” when you are looking for it in March.
Tag it
By boat, by sail wardrobe, or by series — whatever you will want to filter by later.
Review it
Open the session and scrub the timeline to replay the sail with your instrument data alongside.
Does it really keep recording with the screen off?
Yes, provided you granted Always location access. That permission is what lets iOS keep the app alive in the background. With While Using, the recording stops when the app is not in front of you, and you get a track with a hole in it exactly where the interesting part was.
What gets saved?
The full track, and the full history of every instrument channel that was arriving — not just a summary. That is what makes the review useful: you can go back to a specific moment and see what the wind was doing then, rather than only what it averaged across the whole sail.
What do I get when I look at it afterwards?
- Playback — scrub the timeline and watch the boat move along the track with the numbers, and analog gauges, replaying beside it.
- Course performance — time, distance, average and maximum speed, best ten-second burst, and best sustained mile or kilometre.
- Point of sail — how you actually went upwind, reaching and downwind. This one needs real wind data, and is where an instrument feed earns its keep.
Speeds are spike-filtered, so a single bad GPS fix cannot set a record it did not earn. Average speed is distance divided by time, which is the honest number — averaging GPS samples reads high, because a slow boat produces fewer samples per second of sailing than a fast one.
How do I find a sail from months ago?
The sessions list has search, date filters and tag filters, and shows a summary across whatever you have filtered down to — total distance, total time, number of sailing days, maximum and average speed. Filter to one boat, or one series, and you get that season’s numbers without opening anything.
Can I compare two sails?
Yes. Time-trial mode compares runs recorded on different dates against the same course, so you can see whether the new sails, or the new technique, actually made a difference. Racing other boats is covered in fleet races.
Why does my track have a gap in it?
Almost always one of three things. Location permission is set to While Using rather than Always. Low Power Mode is on, which makes iOS more aggressive about suspending background apps. Or the device ran out of battery. If a gap appears with none of those true, please tell us — that is a bug worth chasing.