Performance and Fun

Do you race sailboats? Do you want to go faster? So do we. Boat Thing is a project built by racing sailors with backgrounds in computing and mathematics. Boat Thing captures instrument data, uploads that data to the cloud where analysis yields insights and improved racing performance.

Data Intelligence

To understand how our our boat performs while racing we’ve created hardware connecting the boat’s wind, speed and geo-location sensors to a data pipeline supporting intelligent analysis of performance. This pipeline and analytic results yield insight not previously available to us.

Boat Thing in Action

In the summer of 2018 the sailboat Galatea competed in a series of races on Western Lake Superior. These races varied in length from 10 or so nautical miles to close to 100 nautical miles. During the course of these races all the available instrument data was recorded. Those data are available for download and analysis. Analysis of our 2018 data has already given us insight into sail selection for 2019.

Get Involved

We encourage feedback. Tell us what you’d like to be able to understand about your boat’s performance. We can provide you with a device to plug into your own boat’s network so you can go faster.