What the app does, and how sailors use it.
It records your sailing with GPS — a race, a training session, an evening cruise — and then tells you where the time went. Not just a track on a map: how much distance each tack and gybe cost you, how long your turns took, how your speed compared upwind and down, and how you did against the same boats on the same legs another day.
If you already record on something else, bring that instead. It imports from Garmin and Apple Watch, and reads files from Vakaros, Velocitek, B&G and Raymarine as well as plain GPX and CSV. The phone in your pocket is the easiest way in, not the only one.
Two buttons, two jobs.
The useful thing to know is that the analysis runs either way. A Free Sail still gives you every tack and gybe, what each one cost, your speed and VMG upwind and down — because the wind direction is worked out from how you actually sailed, not from the course you entered. Go out for an hour of tacking practice with nothing set up, and you will still see whether your starboard tacks are costing more than your port ones.
What you only get with a course entered: navigation to the marks, leg-by-leg times, mark roundings scored, the Lock Screen and Watch card, and your times counting towards segment leaderboards.
No. A phone in your pocket is enough. If you already own a Garmin watch, a Vakaros Atlas or an Apple Watch, Sail Robin will take their data too — see Recording a race.
You can, but for racing we'd say use the phone.
A tablet is a good screen for looking at a race afterwards — the replay and the analysis charts have room to breathe. For recording and navigating, take the phone.
No. Everything is unlocked for your first 30 days — no card, nothing to activate. After that, recording, replay, Drop Marks courses and the segment leaderboards stay free forever; the course cards and the detailed analysis are the paid part. See Free & Premium.
There are 175 boat classes built in, from Optimists and dinghies through sportsboats and one-design keelboats to IRC handicap divisions and multihulls. Your class matters because the analysis is tuned to it: a 12-metre keelboat and a 15-foot dinghy do not lose the same distance in a tack, and the app does not pretend they do.
No. Start a race and the app takes care of it. As soon as you set the countdown running it turns on the phone's GPS, and when the countdown hits zero it starts the track and points you at the first mark. There is nothing to press at the gun — which is just as well, because at the gun you have better things to do.
At the other end it is deliberately manual. You stop the recording yourself when you have finished, so a slow finish, a protest, or a lap of honour is yours to include or not. Then you save the race and the analysis is waiting for you.
Yes. Open the race afterwards and tap ✂️ Trim Track. Drag the handle in from either end — the motoring out, the wait in the starting area, the sail home — and tap Apply Trim. The speeds, distances and manoeuvre counts are all recalculated from what is left, so your averages stop being dragged down by twenty minutes of drifting about before the warning signal.
It is not destructive. Restore Full Track puts the whole recording back, however many times you change your mind.
Yes. Recording carries on with the screen off, and the Lock Screen still shows a live navigation card: next mark and its buoy colours, bearing to steer, distance, time to the mark, and progress along the leg. Before the start it counts down to the gun, then switches to the first mark by itself.
The phone still needs to see the sky. Locking the screen is fine — GPS keeps running — but the signal does not care about the screen, it cares about what is above the phone. A jacket pocket or a dry bag on deck is fine. Stuffed in a locker, under a carbon deck or left below is not, and you will come back to a track with holes in it.
Whether you lock it is up to you, and sailors split both ways.
Neither is more correct. A helm in a breeze usually locks it; a tactician with the course to think about usually doesn't. You can switch back and forth mid-race without affecting the recording.
Yes. The same navigation card appears in the Watch Smart Stack — there is no separate watch app to install. This needs iOS 18 and watchOS 11 or later.
Yes, with its GPS track and heart rate.
Record it as an Outdoor Walk, not Sailing. Apple only saves a GPS route for Outdoor Walk, Run, Cycle and Open Water Swim. Its own Sailing workout records no track at all, so there is nothing to import from it. This is Apple's limitation, not ours.
Connect your Garmin account once and your sailing imports by itself after you finish — nothing to export, nothing to upload.
Only what happens on the water comes across. Sailing, windsurfing, kiteboarding and surfing; kayaking, rowing, paddling, stand-up paddleboarding and rafting; boating and wakeboarding. Your morning run and your commute stay where they belong — they are never imported, so your feed stays a sailing feed.
Anything that arrives without a GPS track is turned away as well, so an indoor session on the rowing machine cannot land in your races as an empty card.
Check your recording rate. Garmin's default "Smart Recording" saves a point every four to six seconds. A tack is then two or three points, and the slowest part of the turn falls between them — so every manoeuvre looks cheaper than it was. Set Settings → System → Data Recording → Every Second. Sail Robin adds a private note to any race it detects was recorded too sparsely.
Yes. Pair a chest strap or a band to your phone over Bluetooth and it records alongside the track. It uses the standard Bluetooth heart-rate profile, so a Polar strap, a Garmin or a Wahoo will connect straight away, and a Whoop will too once you turn its heart-rate broadcasting on. If you import from an Apple Watch or a Garmin watch, the heart rate comes in with the track anyway.
What makes it worth doing is where the numbers land. The replay marks your peak and your lowest heart rate on the track itself — not just a graph, but the place on the course where it happened. Most sailors expect the peak at a mark rounding and find it somewhere else entirely: the last thirty seconds before the gun, or the beat where they were fighting the boat rather than sailing it.
All import. Vakaros Atlas files (VKX), Velocitek files (VTK), and NMEA logs from B&G or Raymarine instruments, plus plain GPX and CSV from almost anything else.
From the Vakaros app, you don’t need to save a file anywhere. Share the file from there and pick Sail Robin from the list of apps, on iPhone or Android. Sail Robin opens with the track already loaded — check the name and boat class, and save. The same works for a GPX file from Files, a file manager or an email attachment.
For everything else — Velocitek, NMEA and CSV — get the file onto your phone, then use Import Race on the Sails tab and pick it.
A Vakaros track brings something a phone cannot: heel and trim. Where those are present you get heel and fore-and-aft angle traced through every manoeuvre alongside the speed and VMG — the roll going into a tack, and how quickly the boat came back up.
High-rate data also sharpens everything else. A track sampled several times a second catches the bottom of the speed dip in a tack, the exact moment of a gun, and the shape of a turn — detail that a point every few seconds simply steps over.
On the Racing tab — that is where courses, marks and the start sequence live. (The Record tab is the other one, for sailing that isn't a race; it has no course to enter.) Two ways to do it:
Do it before the start if you can — the course drives the navigation, the leg times and the Lock Screen card, so it wants to be in before the gun rather than after it.
A windward inflatable has no fixed position until the committee lays it, so the app cannot know where it is until you tell it. There are two ways to do that, and the second is the one worth knowing about.
The blackboard method is the useful one because you can do it before the start. Enter the bearing and the distance during the sequence and you have range and bearing to the windward mark from the gun, rather than acquiring it somewhere up the first beat. Distance in metres or nautical miles, whichever the board is using.
Until a mark is tagged by either method, racing still works: the mark shows with its name and rounding, you sail to it by eye as always, and you move the course on by hand when you round.
Yes, and it is on by default. When you round a mark it moves to the next leg without you touching the phone.
It is not a plain proximity trigger — that would fire the moment you got near a mark, which on a crowded windward is well before you have rounded it. Instead it waits until you have been close and are going away again, which is what rounding actually looks like. Two settings shape it, under Auto-Advance Marks in your profile:
A short delay is usually better than instant. It stops the leg flipping over while you are still clearing the mark, so the card in front of you keeps showing what you are doing rather than what you are about to do.
You can turn it off entirely and move the course on by hand, which some sailors prefer on a shifty day with several marks in a small area.
There are prev and next controls on either edge of the racing screen, so you can move the course on or back at any time — on both layouts, in either orientation.
You will want them more often than you'd think:
They need a short press-and-hold rather than a tap, which is deliberate: a wet hand on a pitching deck should not be able to jump you a leg by accident. Hold for half a second and it advances, with a confirmation so you know it took. At the last mark it stops rather than running off the end of the course, and tells you to end the race instead.
Yes — start sequence, gun, and distance to the line, with the countdown on the Lock Screen so the phone can stay away until you need it.
The whole course, read as a set of legs rather than a list of marks. For every leg you get the bearing, the distance, and what that leg will actually be in the current wind — not "mark C to mark H" but Starboard Broad Reach, Upwind long Port, By the lee to Starboard. You can see the tight fetch and the soak before you get to them.
From the true wind angle — the angle between the leg's bearing and the wind. The same bands are used on both tacks, so a leg is described the same way whichever side the wind is on:
So a leg at 62° is a Starboard Fetch — not quite a beat, not quite a reach, and the one people most often get wrong when they look at a course card. A leg at 178° tells you that you are dead downwind and will be sailing angles rather than pointing at the mark.
This is also why changing the wind direction matters so much: shift the wind ten degrees and a Fetch can become a Close Reach, or a Broad Run become a Deep run. The leg didn't move — what you'll have to do on it did.
Two ways, and it only appears while you are actually recording, on the Record or Racing screen.
The automatic part is a setting, under In-Race Display in your profile. Turn it off and the big display only ever appears when you double-tap for it. Turn it on and it comes up on its own. Either way the double-tap works.
Yes — there are two in-race layouts, and which one suits you is mostly about how much you want to read at a glance on a wet deck.
Simple is the one to pick if you are helming in a breeze and want the number you need visible from the back of the boat without leaning in. Classic is for when someone else has the helm and you want the full picture. Switch between them any time under In-Race Display Layout — and both rotate, with Simple spreading its three numbers across the screen in landscape.
Yes, and this is the part tacticians use most. Change the True Wind Direction and every leg re-reads instantly — the wind angle on each leg, and what that leg becomes as a result. You can do it mid-race, between legs, as many times as the breeze moves.
On a club course the wind comes with the course itself: each course letter on the board carries the direction it was designed for, so picking the letter the committee signalled sets it for you. Then nudge it as the day develops.
No — and that is deliberate rather than a gap. A drawn layline is only as good as the angles assumed behind it, and a generic polar for your class is not your boat, your sails or today's sea state.
What you get instead are the two numbers a layline is made of, side by side on the display: the bearing to the mark, and your course over ground. The difference between them is how far off the mark you are pointing right now. Add the one thing the app can tell you that a polar cannot — your own tacking and gybing angles, measured from races you have actually sailed — and you can do the sum yourself, with better inputs than any generic layline would have used.
If the bearing to the windward mark is 040, you are sailing 355, and your analysis says you tack through 86 degrees, then you are not laying it and you know roughly by how much.
This is why knowing your real angles matters so much. Every tack and every gybe costs you — the app will tell you exactly how much, in boat lengths and in seconds. So the question is never just "can I lay it", it is "is the extra tack worth what it costs me". A boat that knows it tacks through 86 degrees and loses 1.2 boat lengths doing it makes that call properly. A boat guessing at both does not.
Yes — with the one thing a start timer has to have: sync. When the gun goes at four minutes and your timer says 4:12, tap sync and it snaps to the whole minute, the way every sailing watch does. The countdown then runs on the Lock Screen and on your Apple Watch, so the phone can go back in the pocket until the gun.
Yes — and time to the line, which is the more useful of the two. Distance tells you where you are; time tells you whether you are going to be early.
Time to line is worked out along your current heading at your current speed: hold this and you cross in eighteen seconds. It also tells you when you are the wrong side of it, so a bad approach shows up before the gun rather than after it.
You have to tag both ends of the line first — the pin and the committee boat. The app cannot work out a line it has not been given, so ping them on your way past during the sequence. It takes a couple of seconds each and it is the difference between a start you can measure and one you can only guess at.
Every tack and every gybe in the race, found automatically, each one with its own row: the time it happened, which tack you were on, your speed going in, your slowest point, your speed coming out, how much you lost, what it cost in seconds and in boat lengths, how far you turned and the wind direction at that moment.
Then the parts that matter for improving:
Yes, and it is one of the most useful cards in the app. If you tagged the line you get how far from it you were when the gun went, whether you were over, and how long you took to cross — so "I think we were a bit late" becomes eleven seconds and forty metres.
It is also where high-rate data earns its keep: with a Vakaros or a RaceSense track the approach and the gun are sampled finely enough to see exactly what happened in the last fifteen seconds, rather than a point every few of them.
You don't have to take anyone's word for it — the app breaks a race down and shows you. Time lost is split into the start, windward mark roundings, tacks, gybes and penalty turns, so you can see which of them is costing you most on your water, in your boat, this season.
Most sailors expect it to be their tacking. For plenty of them it turns out to be the first thirty seconds — a start that leaves you in dirty air costs far more than a slightly slow tack, and it costs it again on every leg you spend getting out of it. But that is a thing to check rather than assume, and it is exactly what the breakdown is for.
Yes, and they are worth more than most of the numbers. Every race has a notes field that is private to you — it stays private even if you make the race itself public, so you can be honest.
What tacticians tend to put in it:
Because the notes sit on the race, they come back with it — so when you look up the last time you sailed this course in this much breeze, the numbers and your own account of it are in the same place.
Yes, and this is where the numbers stop being abstract. Every tack and gybe is marked on the track, and opening one draws the manoeuvre out in full: your speed through the turn with the entry, minimum and exit called out, your rate of turn in degrees per second with the peak marked, your VMG, and — if your track carries it — how far the boat heeled and when it came back up.
You can see the difference between a tack you rolled through cleanly and one where the boat stalled head to wind and took ten seconds to come back. Same two entries in the table; completely different shapes on the chart.
How much distance a manoeuvre cost, measured against the speed you were making before it. The app integrates the shortfall from the moment you begin to slow until you are back up to pace, converts it to metres, and divides by your boat's length — so the number means the same thing whatever you sail. It reports the cost in seconds too, which is often the easier one to argue about in the bar.
The measurement is tuned per class. A twelve-metre keelboat starts bleeding speed long before the helm goes down, because the crew are coming off the rail; a fifteen-foot dinghy does not. Measuring both with the same stopwatch would flatter the big boat, so we don't.
Because it could not be measured, and a zero would be a lie. If you came into a gybe already slow — soaking to set up, a lull, dirty air — and never dropped below that speed, there is no dip to measure. A dash says so. It does not mean the manoeuvre was free.
If your track carries them, yes — heel and fore-and-aft trim traced through every tack and gybe, so you can see the roll going in and the recovery coming out. That data comes from a Vakaros Atlas; a phone or a watch cannot measure it.
Yes. Pick another boat that sailed the same race and the numbers sit side by side — tacks, gybes, entry and exit speeds, turn times, distance lost, and where the gap actually opened. It is a far more useful conversation than comparing finishing positions.
A rival boat that isn't there. Switch it on in the replay and a second boat sails the race alongside you — same course, same wind, same tactics, same moment-by-moment decisions. The only thing it does differently is handle its manoeuvres to a standard.
So when it pulls away from you, it is not because it found more breeze or picked a better shift. It is because of what happened in your tacks. That is the whole point: it strips out everything except boat handling, which is the part you can go and practise on Tuesday.
As good as you ask for. Four levels, each a real standard rather than a vague setting:
It also starts better than most of us: the Club Robin gives away 30% of the line, the Olympic one 3%.
Those figures are a starting point, not the last word. As more races come in, each level will be tuned per class — what a national-standard tack looks like in a Squib is not what it looks like in a 40-footer, and neither is the same in six knots as in twenty. The Robin you race will get more like the boat you are actually up against.
The gap is shown live as you replay — how far ahead or behind, in metres and in seconds. Watch where it changes. A Robin that sits on your transom for a whole beat and then walks away at the windward mark has told you exactly which part of the race to work on.
Pick a level just above where you are now. Racing the Olympic Robin is entertaining for about a minute; racing the National Robin and losing two lengths a tack is the one that changes how you sail.
A stretch of water between two fixed marks. Sail it in a race and your time is recorded, so the same leg on the same water can be compared across different days, different races and different boats. There are 225 of them across the venues.
The fastest time anyone has sailed a segment. Every segment has a leaderboard, and every race you sail is checked against it automatically — no need to set anything up or choose a segment in advance. Finish a race and you will see which legs you set a personal best on, where you sit in the top five, and whether you have taken a crown.
No. Segments, leaderboards and King of the Water are free. Record a race and your times are compared automatically — there is nothing to unlock.
When a race earns something, a pill appears in the corner of it in the feed. They are worth chasing, and they are the first thing anyone scrolling past sees:
Tap any badge to open the detail behind it and see exactly which segment, which time, and who you took it from.
Leaderboards are kept by class, so a Melges 15 is not measured against a forty-footer. Your own personal bests are always there regardless — the most useful comparison is usually yourself, last month.
Annapolis, British Virgin Islands, Chicago, Cualanor, Dublin Bay, Greystones, Howth, Kinsale, Newport RI, Poole, Royal Cork, San Diego, Schull, San Francisco Bay, the Solent and Victoria BC — 538 charted marks between them, in their surveyed positions.
Get in touch. Adding a venue means loading its marks and course cards, which we do from the club's own documents so the letters on your course board mean the same thing in the app.
Try a shorter word, or ask us at info@sailrobin.com — if it is not in here it probably should be.
Still stuck, or want your club added? info@sailrobin.com
Following & sharing
Yes. Follow the people you race against and their races appear in your feed — so you see what the boat that beat you actually did, not just where they finished. Discover Sailors helps you find them: by club, by class, or by the venues you both sail.
Following your own class is the quiet one worth doing. If you sail a Squib, seeing every other Squib's races gives you a fleet-wide benchmark for what a good beat looks like on your water.
Yes, and it is the part people use most. Every race in your feed can be liked, and the faces of everyone who liked it stack up under it — tap them to see the full list. It takes one press, and it is the sailing equivalent of a nod across the dinghy park.
Comments go deeper than that:
You get a notification when someone likes or comments on your race, so a conversation started in the bar carries on afterwards rather than dying with the tide.
Yes — up to three photos and a video on any race. The spinnaker going up, the finish, the crew afterwards. They travel with the race, so when you share it or look back a season later the day is still there, not just the track.
Yes. A link anyone can open in a browser — the track, the replay and the headline numbers, no download and no account. Good for the club WhatsApp group, or for showing someone what you mean about that last beat.
Yes, you can share your position live during a race. Useful for a coach on the RIB, or family watching from the clubhouse.
You choose, race by race. And notes you write on a race are always private to you, even when the race itself is public — so you can be honest about what went wrong without publishing it.