It was not that long ago that you had to steer the boat and figure out where you were and where you wanted to be long hand. Those days are a fleeting memory for our dream team however!
First off they have a comprehensive set of integrated instruments that record and output, back and forth, all sorts of environmental and boat generated information.
By integrated I mean that several different components are connected and talking to each other.
For instance there are myriad sensors and transducers onboard that record wind speed and angle, depth, boat speed, heading, speed over the ground, course over the ground, water temperature and the boats actual position on the face of the earth. The instrument system generates a tremendous amount of secondary information based on the sensor information - things like true wind speed and true wind angle, velocity made good.
All this information is shared into an onboard laptop computer. The computer crunches the numbers constantly and using wanded averages develops optimum speeds and courses for various wind strengths and angles. Upwind and downwind we call these speeds and angles targets. They represent the best angle to sail in the prevailing wind to get upwind or downwind the fastest. If you are making the angles but not the speeds then sail adjustments are indicated. Even when not sailing upwind or down wind the computer will still estimate how fast the boat should be going and these are called polar speeds.
In the plot above the wind direction is from the left side of the screen and each roughly modified circle represents a different wind speed and the computer's estimate of the boat's speed on each of those angles. This information is useful in a racing situation because it tells you pretty quickly how close you are to getting all the performance out of the boat.
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