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How to

Race mode: route from here

Re-route the rest of your race from your live position, as a compact text readout built for weak links at sea.

Race mode: route from here

You planned the race ashore and the plan survived the start by about twenty minutes. Race mode answers the question that matters after that: from where the boat actually is, what is the optimal way to sail the rest of the course?

It lives at /race, and it is deliberately not the workspace. No map, no chart, no forecast download — the whole exchange is a few kilobytes of JSON each way, sized for a phone on Starlink or one bar of offshore cell. The solve runs on our servers; you read back numbers.

Before the race

Plan the route in the workspace as usual and copy its share link. The link carries the course — every mark with its rounding side, gates, the finish — and, if you routed from an ORC certificate, the boat. Send it to your phone.

If you routed from an unsaved pasted polar, keep the text reachable on the phone too. That source was deliberately not retained, so race mode will ask you to paste it again. An ORC certificate or saved polar can be restored without exposing its table through the share link.

Race mode needs a signed-in account.

On the water

  1. Course. Paste the share link and open it.
  2. Position. Tap Use my GPS, or type a lat/lon from the plotter. Then pick the next constraint you have not yet rounded — everything behind it is dropped from the course, and everything ahead keeps its rounding side.
  3. Route from here. The solve usually lands within a minute; a corridor nobody has routed recently can take a few while the forecast is fetched.

Reading the answer

The big number is the heading to steer now. Below it:

  • Maneuver schedule — every tack, gybe, and course alteration over 15°, with its time and the new heading. This is the table to read to the helm at watch change.
  • Legs — an ETA and distance for each remaining mark and the finish. A * means the forecast ran out before that leg completed.
  • Provenance — which model and cycle answered. One model, chosen automatically for where you are; race mode trades the workspace's multi-model consensus for speed and bytes.

Re-route from here re-runs everything with a fresh GPS fix. The auto re-route selector does the same on a 30- or 60-minute clock while the page stays open — about as often as a new forecast cycle can actually change the answer.

What race mode does not do

Race solves are ephemeral. There is no share link, nothing is retained, and your polar is used for the solve and then discarded. The solve is capped at Standard effort and about twenty seconds of search — a coarser answer now beats a finer one after the wind shifts. For the full picture — isochrones, model comparison, departure scans — use the workspace when you are back on real bandwidth.