Mastering Data to Win: Understand Your Instruments to Make the Right Calls & Win Races

The modern racing yacht is awash with onboard instruments and electronics giving enormous amounts of data. But few people fully understand how to get the most out of all the information at their fingertips, let alone make it useful for the team to enable them to win races.

But ace navigators, Mark Chisnell and Gilberto Pastorella, do – both have worked with professional sailing programs all over the world – from America’s Cup to Maxi, ORC / IRC and one-design fleets.

In Mastering Data to Win they take the reader through the process: from understanding the concepts, ensuring accuracy, using the data to win races and then post-race analysis to find performance gains.

By mastering your instruments you can make the right calls every time and know for certain when to tack, which shift to look out for and how the tide can work with or against you. With color diagrams and photographs throughout, this instructional guide turns information into excellence.

Accessible to those new to racing, it also has a depth of information that will transform the performance of even professional sailors.

Table of Contents

The Authors

Foreword

Introduction

The Role of the Navigator

The Key Elements of Data On Board

Setting Up an Instrument System

Some Instrument Techniques

Instrument Techniques Using The Polar Table

Data Collection & Performance Analysis

What’s Next?

Credits

Mark Chisnell divides his time between professional sailing and writing, and has won awards as a broadcaster and for his non-fiction accounts of maritime adventure.
Mark began his writing career with sailing - the sport in which he won three World Championships, and subsequently won plaudits and recognition for his adrenaline-fuelled and suspenseful accounts of round-the-world racing.
Having written a series of technical sailing titles, he is also author of the Janac's Games books, Powder Burn and The Fulcrum Files.

Gilberto Pastorella is an applied mathematician, business and data consultant for multinational companies as well as being a professional sailor and navigator. He sails in the Swan 50 and ORC circuits and is a data analyst for a TP52 team.