About the
Art of Sailing Regatta

Is sailing a skill? Or an art form?  

During our first-in-the-world sketchy sailing event you’ll have a chance to answer the question in your own unique way by sailing your own picture! The course sailed by each boat will be recorded by a tracking app on your phone. The picture created by your track will be scored for artistic impression by a panel of respected artists, and for sailing technique by a panel of skilled sailors. Each of the completed pictures will be displayed on-screen during happy hour and dinner.

Although some sailors are likely to start their own party early, even while still sailing, the official party will start after sailing, at the Columbia Sailing Club.  We’ll start with happy hour and live music and follow that with dinner, and more music. Prizes will be awarded after dinner.  Awards will be presented for the tracks that yield the best artistic impressions, for the tracks that were created using the best sailing techniques, and for the best combined scores.

Each sketchy team will register a helmsperson, a trimmer, and a navigator, and may optionally include other crew. More back seat navigators and more sail-handlers are encouraged! It’s a party – bring your friends!

Let your imagination run wild! Give your kids (or grandkids) a crayon and let them sketch your course plan. Then take ‘em with you on the boat. This is not a race; it intends to attract people who don’t normally race. So sketch up a course plan, get your boat off the dock, and sail the best picture you’ve ever sailed in your life!

Registration is open at URL:Art of Sailing Registration. Registration ($100) includes all social activities for three people (helmsperson, trimmer, and navigator). Registered boats can carry as many people onboard as they desire. If some of those extra people wish to participate in social activities, buy their admission at the online storefront, as described next.

For those who just want to participate in the social activities, or for extra crew members who want to participate in the shore-side social activities, buy admission ($30) to Happy Hour, Dinner, Live Music, and Prize Giving at the online storefront here: Art of Sailing Storefront 

Tips for Planning your Sailing Artwork

Here’s an example of development of a simple course plan. We’ll call this picture “Home on the Range”.

First, sketch up the concept picture. Use a pencil; if you’re not a real artist you’ll probably do a lot of erasing. Here is my simple house on a flat prairie. Easy peasy!

Add a longhorn steer if you dare! We dare not, so we’ll omit the steer from the remaining directions. 

Decide a strategy for orienting the picture relative to the wind. For straight lines with right angle corners, like for most of the lines in this picture, we'll let the wind be 45 degrees from vertical so that either direction along a horizontal or vertical line could be in the “go” zone of your boat. Now sketch arrows on each line segment to indicate which directions each line could be sailed considering the wind direction. In this picture, all lines can be sailed in either direction except for the left roofline which can only be sailed downwind. (The other direction is in the no-go zone of the boat.)

Decide a sequence for sailing the line segments. You can only sail a downwind segment by first getting to the upwind end of it. Draw a single-line approximation to your sketch that creates all of the most significant features.

Pick a few key points that should serve as waypoints – places where lines meet or where you will change course.  You can probably “freehand” sail some lines without waypoints to keep the number of waypoints small. Here we picked six, indicated by the red dots.

On sailing day, rotate your sketch to line up with the wind direction. Pop your waypoints down on a chart of the lake, and go sail your picture! If you’re brave, add the longhorn steer.

Here's what that looks like when I placed those waypoints into the Navionics Boating app. (Free for 30 days, or by subscription (about $50/yr) beyond that time.) One reason to choose only a few waypoints is that you'll have to enter each one of them. I just put mine in by touching the screen in each of the places i wanted to put one. There are other ways to be more precise about the placement. Here is a picture of the Navionics app with waypoints placed. Note that i placed nine waypoints, not six. Later you will see that those nine waypoints did me no good at all.

Tracking App

While sailing the course, i tracked myself with both the Navionics app and the Trace app. We have selected the recently-released Trace phone app as the method for tracking courses during this event. This will allow observers to watch our pictures bloom all across the lake, both live and in subsequent replays, and to selectively view individual tracks. The app is free unless you want the premium features, which you don't need for this regatta.  Instructions on how to use the app for this event will soon be added to this web page. 

First Attempts

My first attempt to sail "Home on the Range"  turned out slightly worse than a four-year-old's crayon rendering of "House on a Hill". Here are my excuses: I was sailing single-handedly, got interrupted as a storm blew through, was wearing sunglasses after the storm but inadvertently had my tracking app in "night mode" so i couldn't see its controls or its waypoints in the bright daylight, and had about six sail-handling mishaps. I also started my picture on a downwind leg and didn't pay proper attention to my initial course-relative-to-wind, so it turned out that I was unable to sail the first vertical wall in the intended direction (because of the wind shift, it had become in the no-go zone - argh!). I immediately had to abandon my plan to "sail by the waypoints" and took up a new plan to "sketch by dead reckoning". This is one reason that the regatta registration asks each boat to register a helmsperson, a trimmer, and a navigator - you will want to have all three onboard! 

Now that I've offered all of my excuses I'll show you the embarrassing results. On the left, as recorded by the Navionics Boating app (rotated and cropped, of course), and on the right as recorded by the Trace app. Of course these two look identical because they recorded the same track that i actually sailed. The Navionics app doesn't show the original waypoints i had entered because i had to neglect them completely after the storm-induced windshift. 

I'll repeat this when i get a chance, with at least one crew to assist, and see if i can do better. Maybe even throw in that longhorn steer. Once i get this simple picture right, i'll dream up a real picture for the competition.