Back in the early years of sailing simulators, the SailTech Simulator set the standard. Unfortunately, it has not been updated since the late 1980s, and is of dubious value now. Still, I spent many hours sailing on it back then, and it was good for learning the fundamental concepts of racing. For instance, I learned what a ladder rung is, and how they are affected by windshifts, and how this changes the relative positions of the boats on the course. I learned what to do in a persistent shift, and how to sail in an oscillating breeze. The simulator represents sail shape very well (what would you expect from a simulator that was co-developed by North Sails?). All sail controls are present, and the results of your tweaking are instantly reflected in the draft stripes and life-like telltales. The lessons driven home here include fundamental ones, such as using your backstay as the primary power control for the whole sailplan, and more subtle ones, such as getting the lead position on the headsail right. You get a trimmer's-eye-view of the main, but a not-so realistic perspective on the genoa, one which more resembles the photos you would give to your sailmaker when taking your sail in for a recut (I think this once again reflects the influence of North). There is no spinnaker simulation, so downwind legs become very boring exercises in keeping a tickler on the main flying. It is on those legs that I usually turn on the automatic sail trimming option. One problem with the sail trimming on this simulator is that it is not done in "real time" -the racing goes on hold while you tweak your sails. When the racing is underway, you get a bird's-eye view of silhouettes of the fleet. You can zoom in and out, and as you zoom out, time passes by more quickly. Accurate modelling of boat handling characteristics is nonexistent. Steering is done by changing course in increments of one or ten degrees. Tacking is done with a single keystroke, happens instantaneously, and costs nothing in terms of boat speed, all of which is far from realistic. There is no prestart manoeuvring to speak of, though this is not surprising for software that was written a decade ago. One further hitch to this simulator is that the competitors seem to get caught in a crisis of indecision at all mark roundings, not knowing whether to go upwind or down, on port tack or starboard, and subsequently get hung up there for several minutes of simulated time. Your boat, which is a keelboat in the thirty foot range, has a full performance instrument package. By watching the numbers, you master concepts such as VMG and target boatspeed. With more attention to the numbers, and you quickly develop the tactical skills to give you the edge over your competition. Finding the median port and starboard tack headings is easy of you have a True Wind Direction readout in your instruments, but turn that function off using the Control Panel, and the job becomes more challenging. In fact, the information provided by all the instruments can only be had in real life with tens of thousands of dollars of electronics and onboard laptops. For instance, you can call up a strip chart that graphically represents the recent wind history, both in terms of direction and strength. You can even look into the future with psychic accuracy--no amount of money can buy you that! But this ability to look into the future is usually unnecessary, because in many situations the behaviour of the wind is far too predictable. At times, the wind oscillates with sinusoidal regularity. This is at best an idealisation of perfect conditions in real life. What makes the simulator even more artificial is the fact that the wind passes through its median direction at exact ten minute intervals, and the port and starboard tack headings at that median fall precisely on the cardinal points of the compass. Quite obviously, this is altogether unrealistic, and it makes things far too easy. But the fatal flaw of the SailTech Simulator is that there are only fifteen different weather scenarios. You very quickly begin to recognise them, and thus know beforehand which side of the course is favoured, when the shifts happen, or when the line squall hits. This places a limit on the lifespan of the program as an enjoyable simulator to play. While setting the early standard for sailing simulators, the SailTech Simulator has been surpassed by other software on the market. With its stress on teaching the fundamental concepts of racing, but otherwise poor representations of real life situations, I can see its only use today as a demonstration tool in racing seminars. One would not want to buy it for any other purpose, and so given what should be a very low demand for it, I would expect its price (around $70) to be a lot lower. Sailing Master is by far the simplest simulator to use. You can jump in and start sailing right away. It is so self explanatory, that simply looking at the screen should be enough to tell you how to manoeuvre the boat. There is no need to consult the manual first to learn the controls. All the controls can be executed by pointing and clicking with a mouse to buttons on the screen. I did find, though, that steering this way was a little hard to master, but this may be because I am not that adept and fast enough with a mouse. Sailing Master is very good as a basic trainer, and so I think it is best suited to novice sailors. It relates well the interplay of trim, angle of heel, telltales, and steering. It is also a racing simulator, though at not nearly the same level of complexity as SailTech. Unlike SailTech, which is a crash course on performance racing, Sailing Master is a gentle and fun introduction to racing, without any of the intimidation. It is more like friendly club racing than grand-prix racing. The racing is held on either windward-leeward or Olympic courses. One interesting feature is that you can specify the length and number of legs of the course. The fleet can be up to four boats, and the boats resemble Lasers. There is some attempt at simulating prestart manoeuvring, but it is no improvement on having no manoeuvring at all. At the beginning of the simulation, there are only seconds to go to the start; all the starts are virtually identical, with two boats on starboard at the line at the gun (your boat being either the windward or leeward boat), and two boats on port crossing behind and thus late for the start. Going upwind, the wind logic is quite good, with realistic oscillations, puffs, and lulls. You have a window that provides a top view of the full course, with the position of the puffs and lulls indicated. The shade of the water around your boat in the main window gets darker to signify puffs, and lighter to signify lulls. A bubbling wake behind your boat gives a quick indication of your boat speed. One complaint I have with this program is that the screen does not scroll with the boat's progress, but rather jumps from one screen to the next. So, as the boat sails off of one edge of the screen, it re-emerges on a new screen, sailing in the same direction, but from the opposite edge. For illustration, suppose your boat sails off of the screen, at the top right, sailing diagonally up and to the right. It will reappear at the bottom left, and continue sailing in the same direction. Whatever other boats that were on the first screen disappear, and the new screen contains whatever objects are in the new area of water into which you are sailing. The problem with this is that it can leave you with very little reaction time to avoid obstacles, such as a starboard tack boat. The computer can place also obstacles such as rowboats or windsurfers at random about the race course. To foul a starboard tack boat means doing a 720, and hitting a rowboat full of fishermen means a costly capsize. Capsizes are rather humorous, with a desperate sailor swimming around the boat and scrambling back on to right it. The computer generated rowboats and fishermen obstacles are mildly humorous as well, though in the end, I found them annoying. Thankfully, that option can be switched off. On crossing the finish line, you receive a rather friendly "Boat Over" hail from the Race Committee. In all, I think the emphasis of Sailing Master is on friendly competition, though if you foul another boat you receive an admonishing hail to "Do Your Circles!" It is a good introduction to sailing and light racing, but it does not progress much beyond that. At a cost of around $80, I think one should expect more. Schnack's Tack (TAC) is a single purpose, no frills program, dedicated to simulating match racing. It does this one thing, and does it well. It is a two-person game, which guarantees that each race will be different. This game gives you the thrill of head-to-head competition. It is easy to outsmart a computer opponent, as it ploddingly and unswervingly follows a preset algorithm. Such a victory rings hollow. But the feeling of beating an unpredictable and cunning competitor, who reacts to each change in your strategy and adjusts accordingly? Now that's real sailing. With this simulator, you are ready to take on all comers; world class match-racers and America's Cup helmsmen are all potential competitors. The graphics in TAC are the most impoverished of the simulators reviewed. It takes a great deal of imagination to see the images on the screen as sailboats. On the plus side, though, the minimalist graphics afford TAC the fastest "frame speed". That is to say, the images flow smoothly into one another, making the graphics appear movie-like. In most other simulators, the images change in a jerky fashion. This depends, of course, on the speed of your computer, with late generation 486 machines having less of a problem with this. But TAC is acceptable even on a 286. TAC gives fairly realistic handling characteristics to the boats. This is especially important for a match-racing situation, where prestart manoeuvring plays such an important role. Whereas the ambience of Sailing Master was relaxed and friendly, things can get pretty heated while playing TAC. This is really a three-person game, the third filling the role of on-the-water judge. The program has its own "instant justice" rulings built in, but they are not sophisticated enough to pick up on some of the finer points of the yacht racing rules, and match racing stretches those rules to the limit. You will very quickly begin to pick up on some of the strategies particular to match racing, such as the prestart circling to gain the controlling position on your competition's stern. While these skills might not be directly applicable to the kind of racing you do, at least you will be able to appreciate some of the subtleties that are going on when you watch the next America's Cup on ESPN. With a price in the $45 range, this is a simulator that gives you a lot of bang for your buck, if match racing is your thing. The Dolphin Sailing Simulator is a cruising simulator, which (at least according to its marketers) emphasises teaching safety. I find this billing puzzling, however, because I did not see too much of this emphasis in evidence. Dolphin tries the hardest to capture the spirit of that buzz phrase of the nineties--virtual reality. When you put the helm over, you see your "hands" turn the wheel; when you let out the genoa sheet, you see your "hands" at the winch. This is nice, perhaps a little cute. At times, though, this gets carried away, and becomes a little annoying. When you turn on the autohelm, an icon appears on the screen to tell you it is in operation. This is exactly what I would expect, and should be sufficient. But you also are shown your "hand", with index finger extended, flicking on the switch. This I don't need to see. Now, you might say that this is harmless, and I should just ignore it. But the instrument panel upon which the autohelm switch is located is on the starboard side of the cockpit, and so by turning on the autohelm, the view automatically swivels to look out to starboard. Several keystrokes are required to look at whatever it was you were looking at before you turned on the autohelm. So, you can see how the zeal for virtual reality can be somewhat obtrusive. What I did like about this simulator is its honest attempt at providing you with a virtual world to sail around in that is a representation of a real world place. The game disk comes with Chesapeake Bay, and other well known cruising grounds are available on further disks you can buy. San Francisco Bay, Long Island Sound, and the San Juan and Gulf Islands are three notable examples of additional sailing areas open to you. The makers of Dolphin went to a lot of trouble (read: thousands of person hours) digitizing maps, and then laboriously adding individual details and landmarks to stick up from an otherwise two dimensional plane. I applaud their efforts, though I think that for the investment of time they put in they could have come up with some better results. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is certainly impressive, but the treatment of ordinary landmasses leaves a lot to be desired. The shores of the bay are lined with phalanxes of enormous green pyramids. I would much rather see something that more resembles the lay of the land when seen from the water than artificial geometric shapes. Perhaps if they digitized not just a chart of the waters, but a topological map of the shore as well, something more realistic could have been achieved. But I'm no computer whiz, so I have no idea of the feasibility of this. Secondly, when Dolphin undertook this project, they had to take a hard look at what kind of return on their investment the market could support. Perhaps their market surveys suggested that, given what consumers would be happy with, the extra effort to improve the scenery would not be worth it. But I think it is time for us consumers to up the ante and demand more. Other simulators have pushed the standards for graphics much higher, and Dolphin will have to keep up to stay competitive. The overall graphics appearance in Dolphin is very dated: it has the look of mid-1980s Atari games. The boats have a cumbersome, box like appearance, and the view provided of the sails is below par. The only feature to the graphics that I got a kick out of was the radar screen, and the way it comes into view when you are at the navigator's station. One curious quirk of the program is that I was unable to spot any of the navigation aids on the water, apart from the lighthouses, even though the buoys are clearly indicated on the charts. Dolphin is organized around the function keys on your IBM-compatible. Each function key takes you to a different area of the boat--the foredeck, the nav station, the cockpit, and so on. There are a large number of commands to learn, but they seem to be laid out in an organised fashion. Dolphin frames the actual sailing aspect of the simulation with pages of introductions and conclusions. Most of these seemed extraneous to me. It took too long to get through the opening frames and begin sailing. When you use the simulator for the first time, you are presented with screens that tried my patience and nearly insulted my intelligence. During a cruise, important messages are relayed to you in voice bubbles. Most of these are helpful, but some can be inane. At the end of a cruise you are scored on your performance. However, there is no detailed explanation of how your score is arrived at. You are not told what you did right or what you did wrong. So there is no way of knowing how to improve for next time. The different scenarios I encountered in the various cruises did not challenge me enough. I did not learn new skills, nor did I find the graphics to be impressive enough to hold my interest. I think you money is better spent on a program that you can learn from. Posey Yacht Design produces a whole line of sailing simulators, covering a wide variety of sailing. I have looked at three of their six programs: the Coastal Cruising, Tactics and Strategy, and Advanced Racing simulators. Coastal Cruising places you in a computer-generated world of islands, estuaries, and inlets. You can choose between northern or southern waters, either in a coastal or island situation. A Bahamian setting adds the additional feature of coral reefs. The simulation includes all of the features a well-equipped cruising boat ought to have: GPS with waypoints, radar, depth-sounder, hand-bearing compass, dividers, two anchors, and a good sail inventory. Now, none of the things listed here are absent in the Dolphin simulator. And yet the educational value of the Posey simulator is far higher. The difference lies in the way the Posey simulator throws challenges at you. At higher levels of difficulty, you can suddenly lose some or all of the electronics, or perhaps the use of the engine. This can lead to some anxious moments--say, when negotiating a tricky entrance to an anchorage with a strong tide flowing, and you lose the use of your engine. Or perhaps you are in thick fog, and you lose your radar. By contrast, setting higher difficulty levels in the Dolphin simulator seems to make no appreciable difference to the actual sailing, but instead affects only what kind of commands are available to you, and what kind of on-screen help is available. The difficulty there is a just a function of how well you are familiar with the particular program, not your sailing skill. What makes Posey's Coastal Cruising a good simulator is that it can be as relaxing--as cruising is supposed to be--or as stressful as you want. The educational value of practising what to do in emergency situations cannot be overemphasized. Having multiple gear failures is hardly true to life (or at least, one would hope!) so the knowledge and skills learned through Coastal Cruising are not exactly directly applicable to the real world. What does get passed on is the confidence that you can handle any emergency with aplomb. Practising on a computer gets you to ignore superficial details, and focus on the priorities. The bolts of lightning on the horizon? Cause for concern alright, but the important thing right now is that I am in 27 knots of wind, heeling beyond 26 degrees because I have too much canvas up, and as a result, I am having difficulty steering to a course that would take me to a sheltered harbour. There is a certain cool detachment that goes with computer simulations, so your decisions can aspire to pure rational thinking, unaffected by panic or adrenalin. Coastal Cruising comes with a very good, extremely well written manual. Reading the pages that discuss anchoring made me realise that the manual is more than just a manual for a computer program. It goes beyond telling you which buttons to push to make the simulator work. It is full of sound cruising advice, drawn from Dennis and Charlotte Posey's extensive cruising experience. I thought that the manual, which read more like a cruising how-to, blurred the distinction between virtual reality and the real world. The Advanced Racing Simulator by Posey is a very challenging, but rewarding simulator. I have not been bored with this simulator in over a year and a half of intense racing. Part of what has kept me interested is the fact that the weather scenarios are more realistic, and do not repeat often. The graphics are passible, but in this simulator the focus is on racing, not looking good. (Incidentally, the graphics are essentially the same as found in Coastal Cruising.) The images of the sailboats are generated out of geometric figures such as ellipses and triangles. Surprisingly, this method achieves acceptable results for sail shape. The perspective on the race course you get is that of a floating eye-ball, at masthead level, on your boat's weather quarter. This is a compromise between the bird's-eye-view and a trimmer's-eye or helm's-eye-view. A top down view of the race course is obviously unrealistic, and gives too much information away concerning the relative position of boats in the race. A perspective from onboard the boat is more true to life, but is difficult to do on a screen with a limited field of view, and it can be bewildering for the user. One drawback of such the perspective adopted by Advanced Racing is that there is no detailed view of the headsail. This forced the authors of the simulator to reduce jib trim to a minor component of the game. There is a good view of the spinnaker (and a nice sequence of it when it collapses), but the player does not get to trim it at all. Advanced Racing has significant advancements over other simulators in its niche. Its simulation of prestart manoeuvring is the best there is. It captures the feeling of large one-design starts, where the fleet approaches the line with sails luffing, accelerates with just a few seconds to go, and then points up with speed at the gun. It is tricky to get a good start with clear air, and the rather irritating fact that the other competitors seem to accelerate faster than you makes this even more difficult. All of the major sail controls for main trim and rig adjustment are represented. In the Windows and MacIntosh versions, they are adjusted using pull-down menus. In the DOS version, they are three-way toggles controlled through the keyboard. I found that ones reaction time to a gust is significantly faster in the DOS version. The Windows version has a nice opening screen to the simulator. The DOS introduction is by comparison rather cold. One good feature of the Windows version is that you can speed up or slow down the clock: fastest for long runs, slower for important mark roundings. My biggest gripe with Advanced Racing is something that I have already alluded to: there are large discrepancies between the performance of the boat you control, and your computer controlled competition. The other boats in the fleet lose less speed in a tack, and accelerate out of the tack faster. Quite often, you find yourself leebowed by a boat that a would be unsuccessful in the bid if attempted in real life. Tacking your boat, by comparison, is extremely costly. You lose well over half of your boatspeed, and it takes a long time to gain it back, no matter how much you power up your sailplan. At the higher difficulty levels, the other boats have a significant speed advantage over you. Now, I am used to situations where I am over a half a knot slower upwind than a competitor--it's called IMS sailing, and I am compensated for it. It is no fun racing in what is supposedly one-design racing when, no matter how well tweaked your boat is, your competition steadily rolls over you. I find that I have to set the difficulty at around 11 (out of 15) to get racing that is fairly equitable, and yet with aggressive enough starts, and the like, to be challenging. I would rather see at the higher difficulty levels the competition getting smarter, not simply faster, possibly through greater foreknowledge of the wind conditions. After all, isn't this what the truly great sailors have more of, rather than raw straight-line speed? One other complaint I have with this simulator is that it provides you with your tactical information already predigested, and given to you in terms of degrees headed or lifted from the median wind direction. I would rather be given the raw data (the boat's heading) and get the practice crunching the numbers myself. Overall, Advanced Racing is a great teaching tool. By playing it, it taught me the importance of balance, reacting to gusts, and fighting for clear air. It is a difficult simulator to master, but its rewards are great. Tactics and Strategy by Posey is a simulator that moves you away from pulling the strings and tweaking the sails, and places you in the afterguard, where you have to make all the decisions about how to get around the course, based on factors such as wind and current. Tactics and Strategy gives you good one-design racing. You can have a fleet of up to 15. Even with this large of a fleet, the computer does not slow down noticeably. The graphics flow with near movie-like speed. The graphics are for the most part a bird's-eye view of the race course, with zoom. You can choose between a variety of different popular one designs, and even specify some of the design characteristics of the small keelboat and offshore keelboat. There is a very simplified set of sailing controls. For the most part, the computer does the trimming for you. The racing takes place in one of a number of computer generated settings, each one intended to mimic the conditions of typical racing venues, from a small inland lake, to a tidal sound. Apart from the standard triangle and windward-leeward courses, there is a long distance race and a round-the-island race based loosely on the Round Block Island Race. There is a match racing option, in which Player One uses the mouse and Player Two uses the keyboard. I have very few complaints to make about this simulator. There is very little by way of realism with respect to the handling characteristics of the boats. You can manoeuvre a little too easily. For instance, you can instantly snap off a 100 degree turn at no cost to your boatspeed, which gives you a huge edge during the prestarts. On the whole, this is an excellent way tool for learning how to get your head out of the boat and concentrate on the big picture. Stentec is a recent arrival to the North American market, having originated in Holland. It is for IBM-compatible machines only. It should also be stressed that this is *not* a racing simulator. Actually, you can race against the clock around a course, but the point is that you have the whole world to yourself; no other boats other than yours appear. The graphics in Stentec are far superior those of other simulators. The boats are represented in 3-D, and you can "fly" your point of view to any position around the boat, like a helicopter. Because of the complexity of the graphics, a faster computer with more memory is almost required. There are some problems with the graphics, such as the spinnaker showing through the main when it in fact should be hidden. I have been told that the makers of Stentec are working on the problems. There is a selection of boats to sail, including Dragon, FD, Laser, Tornado cat, and a 33ft. keelboat. The modelling of the handling characteristics and sailing dynamics of the boats is also superlative. Pitchpoling the Tornado, which I managed to do once, was breathtaking. The keelboat has that sickening rolling when running in heavy air downwind, and the jibe-broach that usually follows it is frighteningly accurate. Stentec incorporates wave dynamics into its simulation. While other simulators have waves too, Stentec's is tops. It is so realistic, it is almost enough to give one motion sickness just looking at it. Unlike the wave action of other simulators, Stentec integrates it with the whole simulation. Even the apparent wind changes as you roll over the swells. As in Dolphin, the sailing takes place in representations of actual waters. The areas available have a decidedly European bias, but this is not surprising, given where the software comes from. The most interesting feature is that you can customize your own areas. For instance, if you wanted to create the Bay of Quinte, you can plot and save the shoreline with up to 5 m. accuracy. The world of Stentec is only two dimensional, but you can see all the relevant details of the shoreline from the helicopter viewpoint (although this does not work so well from a vantage point close to the water). There are quite a number of commands to learn, though I consider the simulator as a whole to be good enough for it to be worth your while to commit some to memory. All the sail controls are performed with combinations of either the Alt, Shift, or Ctrl key and a function key, much in the same way that WordPerfect is organised. All other auxiliary commands are performed with lowercase or uppercase letters. There is a nice laminated card provided as a reference to help you out if you forget. Steering on the keyboard is done with two keys, but I thought that it gave a poor response. The boat can also be controlled with the mouse, through a daunting series of combinations of rolling the mouse up, down or sideways, while holding down one of the three buttons (it has to be a three-button mouse). I don't think I would have the kinaesthetic memory nor dexterity to perform those complicated combinations of mouse movements together with button pushes. Finally, the game can be ordered with a special control unit, which has a tiller and a slide for the sheet. This requires a game port on your computer (you can also use a joystick in your game port for the tiller). Unfortunately, I did not test the simulator with the control unit. In the Stentec simulator, you have god-like control over the wind. You can increase or decrease the wind strength in increments of a Beaufort at the touch of a button. Whereas the Posey Coastal Cruising simulator engendered a "Hey, I can do this" attitude, Stentec quickly brings you back to a healthy respect for the sea and its power. Dial things up to a Force 12 gale with 7 m. waves, and things get frightening. You are totally at the mercy of the elements. It is truly awesome. There are some problems I noticed with Stentec. With certain of the boats, you can coast head-to-wind and still sustain 4 knots of boatspeed--hardly realistic! When sailing closehauled, the boats display an unsettling leeward helm problem, which no amount of mast rake can seem to dispel. The manual that comes with the program has some quirky turns of phrase, but I think this is the result of a mediocre translation from Dutch to English. I am told by the Canadian distributors of the game that they are working on this. Overall, the Stentec simulator is very impressive, and I highly endorse it. I find it mesmerizing: I can look at it all day, zooming my point of view around boat and watching the image of the boat change. It keeps my interest, despite the fact that it is not a racing simulator, which is something that the Dolphin simulator failed to do. As for value for your money, the price including the control unit is the right price. NOW THE SHORT VERSION (with lame introduction) How do sailors in Canada survive the long winter months, when most of the water is frozen solid? One way of keeping ones skills sharp is to sail in a world where there is no ice, no end of season haulout, and for that matter, no seasons. No, this world is not the Caribbean. You can sail this world for a lot less money, and you don't have to fly anywhere. It is a world that is contained within your home computer. I am referring to sailing simulators. Simulators place you in situations that emulate real ones, and leave you to make the decisions and control the boat. There are now a number of simulators on the market, covering various types of sailing. Most focus on racing (and some get even more specialized than that), while others put the emphasis on cruising. This is a review of most of the software available, to tell you which ones are interesting and educational, and which ones are not. Back in the early years of sailing simulators, the SailTech Simulator set the standard. It has not been updated since the late 1980s, and is of dubious value now. This is not to say that it is totally lacking in educational value. Sailtech does teach some of the fundamental concepts of racing. You learn what a ladder rung is, and how they are affected by windshifts, and how this changes the relative positions of the boats on the course. You learn what to do in a persistent shift, and how to sail in an oscillating breeze. However, the situations in which these concepts are illustrated are so artificial, SailTech seems more like a classroom exercise than a simulator. The simulator represents sail shape very well (what would you expect from a simulator that was co-developed by North Sails?). All sail controls are present, and the results of your tweaking are instantly reflected in the draft stripes and life-like telltales. Although sail shape is done well, accurate modelling of boat handling characteristics is nonexistent. There is no prestart manoeuvring to speak of, though this is not surprising for software that was written a decade ago. In addition to stressing sail shape and trim, SailTech is quite good on the strategic aspects of racing. You learn concepts such as VMG and target boatspeed, as well as acquiring the tactical skills to give you an edge over your competition. The fatal flaw, however, of the SailTech Simulator is that there are only fifteen different weather scenarios in which to exercise your developing skills. You very quickly begin to recognise the conditions, and thus know in advance how to act. Without this element of novelty, the lifespan of the program as an enjoyable simulator to play is severely limited. While setting the early standard for sailing simulators, the SailTech Simulator has been surpassed by other software on the market. Sailing Master by Starboard Software is by far the simplest simulator to use. You can jump in and start sailing right away. It is very good as a basic trainer, and so I think it is best suited to novice sailors. It relates well the interplay of trim, angle of heel, telltales, and steering. It is also a racing simulator, but it is more like friendly club racing than grand prix racing. The fleet can be up to four boats, and the boats resemble Lasers. There is some attempt at simulating prestart manoeuvring, but it is no improvement on having no manoeuvring at all. Going upwind, the wind logic is quite good, with realistic oscillations, puffs, and lulls. One complaint I have with this program is that the screen does not scroll with the boat's progress, but rather jumps from one screen to the next. This can leave you with very little reaction time to avoid obstacles, such as a starboard tack boat. On crossing the finish line, you receive a rather friendly "Boat Over" hail from the Race Committee. In all, I think the emphasis of Sailing Master is on friendly competition, though if you foul another boat you receive an admonishing hail to "Do Your Circles!" It is a good introduction to sailing and light racing, but it does not progress much beyond that. At a cost of around $80, I think one should expect more. Schnack's Tack (TAC) is a single purpose, no frills program, dedicated to simulating match racing. It does this one thing, and does it well. It is a two-person game, which guarantees that each race will be different. This game gives you the thrill of head-to-head competition. It is easy to outsmart a computer opponent, as it ploddingly and unswervingly follows a preset algorithm. Such a victory rings hollow. But the feeling of beating an unpredictable and cunning competitor, who reacts to each change in your strategy and adjusts accordingly? Now that's real sailing. The graphics in TAC are the most impoverished of the simulators reviewed. It takes a great deal of imagination to see the images on the screen as sailboats. On the plus side, though, the minimalist graphics afford TAC the fastest "frame speed". That is to say, the images flow smoothly into one another, making the graphics appear movie-like. In most other simulators, the images change in a jerky fashion. This depends, of course, on the speed of your computer, with late-generation 486 machines having less of a problem with this. But TAC is acceptable even on a 286. TAC gives fairly realistic handling characteristics to the boats. This is especially important for a match-racing situation, where prestart manoeuvring plays such an important role. Whereas the ambience of Sailing Master was relaxed and friendly, things can get pretty heated while playing TAC. This is really a three-person game, the third filling the role of on-the-water judge. The program has its own rule enforcement, but it is not sophisticated enough to handle the demands of match racing. You will very quickly begin to pick up on some of the strategies particular to match racing. While these skills might not be directly applicable to the kind of racing you do, at least you will be able to appreciate some of the subtleties going on when you watch the next America's Cup. If match racing is your thing, then at around $45 Schnack's Tack gives you a lot of enjoyment at a reasonable cost. The Dolphin Sailing Simulator III is a cruising simulator that tries the hardest to achieve virtual reality. When you put the helm over, you see your "hands" turn the wheel. This is nice; perhaps a little cute. What I did like about this simulator is that the sailing takes place in a 3-D representation of a real world environment. The game disk comes with Chesapeake Bay, and other well known cruising grounds are available on further disks you can buy. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is certainly impressive, but the treatment of many other landmarks leaves a lot to be desired. The overall appearance of the graphics in Dolphin is very dated. The boats have a cumbersome, box-like appearance, and the view provided of the sails is sub par. Dolphin frames the actual sailing aspect of the simulation with introductory and conclusory pages. Most of these seemed extraneous to me. It took too long to begin sailing. At the end of a cruise you are scored on your performance. However, there is no detailed explanation of how your score is tabulated, which makes it difficult to know how to improve for next time. The different scenarios I encountered in the various cruises did not challenge me enough. I did not learn new skills, nor did I find the graphics to be impressive enough to hold my interest. I think you money ($75) is better spent on a program that you can learn from. Posey Yacht Design produces a whole line of sailing simulators, covering a wide variety of sailing. I have looked at three of their six programs: the Coastal Cruising, Tactics and Strategy, and Advanced Racing simulators. Coastal Cruising places you in a computer-generated world of islands, estuaries, and inlets. You can choose between northern or southern waters, either in a coastal or island situation. A Bahamian setting adds the additional feature of coral reefs. The simulated boat includes all of the features a well-equipped cruiser ought to have: GPS with waypoints, radar, depth-sounder, handbearing compass, dividers, two anchors, and a good sail inventory. Now, none of the things listed here are absent in the Dolphin simulator. And yet the educational value of the Posey simulator is far higher. The difference lies in the way the Posey simulator throws challenges your way. At higher levels of difficulty, you can suddenly lose some or all of the electronics, or perhaps the use of the engine. You quickly learn not to rely on one method of navigation. What makes Posey's Coastal Cruising a good simulator is that it can be as relaxing--as cruising is supposed to be--or as stressful as you want. The educational value of practising what to do in emergencies cannot be overemphasized. With Coastal Cruising, you gain the confidence that you can handle any situation with aplomb. Practising on a computer allows you to ignore superficial details, and focus on the priorities. There is a certain cool detachment that goes with computer simulations, so your decisions can aspire to pure rational thinking, unaffected by panic or adrenalin. Coastal Cruising comes with a helpful, very well written manual. Reading the pages that discuss anchoring made me realise that the manual is more than just a manual for a computer program telling me which buttons to push to make the simulator work. It is full of sound cruising advice, drawn from the extensive cruising experience of the makers of this software. Coastal Cruising is a very enjoyable and valuable simulator. The Advanced Racing Simulator by Posey is a very challenging, but rewarding simulator. I have not been bored with this simulator in over a year and a half of intense racing. Part of what has kept me interested is the fact that the weather scenarios are more realistic, and do not repeat often. The graphics are passible, but in this simulator the focus is on racing, not looking good. (Incidentally, the graphics are essentially the same as found in Coastal Cruising.) The view in the graphics is from masthead height, on your boat's weather quarter. One drawback of such this perspective is that there is no detailed view of the headsail. Because of this, jib trim has been reduced to a minor component of the game. Advanced Racing has significant advancements over other simulators in its niche. Its simulation of prestart manoeuvring is the best of the simulators reviewed. It captures the feeling of large one design starts, where the fleet approaches the line with sails luffing, accelerates with just a few seconds to go, and then points up with speed at the gun. It is tricky to get a good start with clear air, and the rather irritating fact that the other competitors seem to accelerate faster than you makes this even more difficult. In fact, there are on the whole large discrepancies between the performance of your boat and your computer controlled competition. One other complaint I have with this simulator is that it provides you with your tactical information already predigested. I would rather be given the raw data and practice crunching the numbers myself. Overall, Advanced Racing is a great teaching tool. It taught me the importance of angle of heel, reacting to gusts, changing gears, and fighting for clear air. It is a difficult simulator to master, but its rewards are great. Tactics and Strategy by Posey is a simulator that moves you away from pulling the strings and tweaking the sails, and places you in the afterguard, where you have to make all the decisions about how to get around the course, based on factors such as wind and current. Tactics and Strategy gives you good one-design racing. You can have a fleet of up to 15. Even with this large of a fleet, the computer does not slow down noticeably. The graphics flow with near movie-like speed. The graphics are for the most part a bird's-eye view of the race course. You can choose between a variety of different popular one-designs, and even specify some of the design characteristics of the small keelboat and offshore keelboat. There is a very simplified set of sailing controls. The computer does most of the trimming for you. The racing takes place in one of a number of computer generated settings, each one intended to mimic the conditions of typical racing venues, from a small inland lake, to a tidal sound. Apart from the standard triangle and windward-leeward courses, there is a long distance race and a round-the-island race based loosely on the Round Block Island Race. There is a match racing option, in which Player One uses the mouse and Player Two uses the keyboard. I have very few complaints to make about this simulator. On the whole, this is an excellent way tool for learning how to get your head out of the boat and concentrate on the big picture. All three Posey simulators--Coastal Cruising, Advanced Racing, and Tactics and Strategy--are programs with very high educational and entertainment value, and are worth the $80 price. Stentec is a recent arrival from Holland to the North American market. It is for IBM-compatible machines only. It should also be stressed that this is *not* a racing simulator. Actually, you can race against the clock around a course, but the point is that no other boats other than yours inhabit the world of Stentec. The graphics in Stentec are far superior than those of other simulators. The boats are represented in 3-D, and you can "fly" your point of view to any position around the boat, like a helicopter. There is a selection of boats to sail, including Dragon, FD, Laser, Tornado cat, and a 33ft. keelboat. The modelling of the handling characteristics and sailing dynamics of the boats is also superlative. Pitchpoling the Tornado, which I managed to do once, was breathtaking. The keelboat has that sickening rolling when running in heavy air downwind, and the jibe-broach that usually follows it is frighteningly accurate. Stentec incorporates wave dynamics into its simulation. While other simulators have waves as well, Stentec's is tops. It is so realistic, it is almost enough to give one motion sickness just looking at it. As in Dolphin, the sailing takes place in representations of actual waters. The areas available have a decidedly European bias, but this is not surprising, given where the software comes from. The most interesting feature is that you can customize your own areas. The simulated boat can be controlled by three methods: keyboard, mouse, or a special control unit. The control unit has a tiller and a slide for the sheet, and it requires a game port on your computer. Unfortunately, I did not test the simulator with this control unit. In the Stentec simulator, you have god-like control over the wind. You can increase or decrease the wind strength in increments of a Beaufort at the touch of a button. Whereas the Posey Coastal Cruising simulator engendered a "Hey, I can do this" feeling, Stentec quickly brings you back to a healthy respect for the sea and its power. Dial the conditions up to a Force 12 gale with 7 m. waves, and the sailing get frightening. You are totally at the mercy of the elements. There are a few glitches to Stentec, however. There is a tendency for the spinnaker to show through the main, when it should be hidden. With certain of the boats, you can coast head-to-wind and still sustain 4 knots of boatspeed--hardly realistic! When sailing upwind, all the boats display an unsettling leeward helm problem, which no amount of mast rake can seem to dispel. Overall, the Stentec simulator is very impressive, and I highly endorse it. I find it mesmerizing: I can look at it all day, zooming my point of view around boat and watching the image of the boat change. It keeps my interest, despite the fact that it is not a racing simulator. As for value for your dollar, the price for the game without the control unit is unbeatable, considering the quality of what you are getting, and the price including the control unit is also a good buy. Summary: Scores: 5 excellent 4 good 3 fair 2 poor 1 ugh / Posey \ SailTech S.Master TAC Dolphin C.C. A.R. T.S. Stent Graphics 3 2 1 3 4 4 3 5 Ease of use 3.5 5 3 2.5 3 3 4 2 Realism 1 2 3.5 2 4 4 2 5 Educational 4 3 3 1 4 4 4 3 value Bang 1 2 5 2 4.5 4.5 4 5 for buck Believ- 1 1 1 3 4 4 1 5 ability Attention 2 2 5 1 4 5 4 5 Span Key: Graphics -- visual sumptuousness, appeal to eye ease of use -- how complicated are the commands? how many? realism -- how well does this program model boat handling & dynamics? educational value -- do I learn a lot from using this program? bang for buck -- monetary value. Is it worth the price? believability - how well does this program maintain the illusion of sailing? attention span - how long was it before I got bored of this? How to get these programs Stentec Sailing Simulator contact: Amtex Software P.O. Box 572 Belleville, Ontario K8N 5B2 phone (613) 967-7900 price: with control unit - $124.95 (Can) without control unit - $79.95 (Can) requirements: IBM compatible (minimum 8 Mhz, 386 or better recommended), Dos 3.3 or higher, 550 kb RAM, 2 Mb disk, EGA or VGA, game port for control unit Dolphin Sailing Simulator III contact: Dolphin Marine Systems, Inc. P.O. Box 188 Downington, PN 19335 (610) 269-6800 (610) 873-7422 (fax) price: $74.95 (US) $7.50 s&h requirements: IBM only, 256-colour VGA, 640 kb RAM, 1.4 Mb disk Coastal Cruising, Advanced Racing Simulator, Tactics and Strategy contact: Posey Yacht Design 101 Parmalee Road Haddam CT 06438 (203) 345-2685 fax number? 1-800 number? price: $54.95 (US) + 4.00 s&h (Visa, Mastercard) requirements: Windows - 3.0 or higher DOS - 2.1 or higher, 256 kb RAM, CGA, EGA, VGA, or Hercules (monochrome) hard disk optional Mac - colour Mac and System 6.0.7 or higher, or monocrome Mac & System 7 or higher Sailing Master contact: Starboard Software Box 1462 Royal Oak, MI 48068 (810) 545-9928 (810) 545-9049 (fax) 1-800-237-8400 ext. 540 price: $59.99 (US) + $5.00 s&h (Visa, MasterCard, Amex) requirements: PC- 286 or faster, Windows 3.1, 2 Mb RAM, 1 Mb disk Mac- System 6.O.x or 7.x, 1 Mb RAM, 1 Mb disk SailTech and Schnack's Tack are available through the North Sails catalogue ($69.99 and $43.95 (Can) respectively), as are all of the programs listed above. Contact your local North Sails loft, or call 1-800-939-7245.