If you coach competitive sailors, you know the drill.

You're on the RIB, watching your fleet. You can see who's fast and who's not — roughly. You can shout feedback through a megaphone. You scribble notes on a whiteboard that's going to get soaked.

Then you get home, and the debrief starts. What happened on that second upwind? Who had the best start? What was Boat 3's heel angle when they capsized? You try to reconstruct the session from memory, maybe cross-referencing a few GPS files someone remembered to export.

It works. Coaches have been doing it this way for decades. But there's a gap between what you saw and what actually happened — and that gap gets wider with every boat you add to the group.

What if your iPad showed you everything?

Since October 2025, we've been working with America One Racing on something different. During their foiling camps in Penscaola and in Miami, every boat carries an iPhone. That's it — no specialized hardware, no $1,500 GPS trackers, no complicated setup.

Each phone streams live data over cellular: position, speed, heading, heel angle, pitch. The coach opens ChartedSails on their iPad, and they can see every boat on the map, updating in real time.

"This elevates the standard of coaching and gives our athletes a new level of clarity and performance insight." — Leandro Spina, Director, America One Racing

But live positions are just the beginning. From the coach's iPad, you can also:

Set up the course. Drop marks directly on the map by pinging their GPS positions from the app. Your sailors can see the course on their phones too.

Run the race timer. Start the countdown from your iPad. Every phone in the fleet gets the signal.

Take notes on the water that stick to the data. This is a big one. See something worth noting? Tap to add a comment directly inside ChartedSails: "Boat 3 sailing too low on this beat" or "Good gybe from Gavin, minimal speed loss." Every note is automatically timestamped and tied to the exact GPS position. When you get back to shore, your observations are already organized, attached to the data, and ready for the debrief. No more scribbling on a whiteboard that gets soaked. No more trying to remember what you saw on race 3.

End the session with one tap. When you're done for the day, hit "End Session" and every phone stops recording, uploads its data, and it's all waiting for you when you sit down to debrief. No chasing files, no exports, no "can you send me your track?"

You can start with the phones you already have

Here's the part that surprises people: the cost to try this is $0.

If your sailors have iPhones, they can use their own. Download the ChartedSails app, join the session, mount the phone to the boat, and you're streaming live data. That's it. No new hardware to buy, no trackers to charge, no setup to troubleshoot.

This is the fastest way to see if live coaching data changes your practice. One afternoon, a few phones, and you'll know.

When you're ready to go all-in, the dedicated setup is straightforward: get refurbished iPhones for each boat, add protective cases with 3D-printed mounts designed for your specific class, install eSIMs for reliable cellular ($9/month per boat with Nomad eSIM on AT&T/Verizon), and pack it all in a suitcase. That's your portable coaching telemetry kit.

For context: most live tracking solutions require specialized GPS hardware at over a grand per boat. For a program with 8–10 boats, that's at least $10,000 in trackers alone. An iPhone does more — GPS, heel, pitch, heading, cellular streaming — and it's still a phone when you're done.

Hard data to back up what you see

Every coach develops instincts on the water. You can tell when a boat looks slow, when someone's angle is off, when a gybe was sloppy. But instinct is hard to debrief with.

"I think A was going faster than B" becomes a debate. With live data, it becomes a fact. You can see that A was doing 6.8 knots VMG at 42° while B was doing 5.9 at 47° — and now the conversation is about why, not whether.

That shift changes everything about the debrief.

Instead of "I think you were slow on that beat," you can say "on beat 2, your VMG was 5.9 knots while Gavin was doing 6.8. You were sailing 5° lower. Let's look at what he was doing differently."

Instead of trying to remember what happened on race 4, you can pull up the replay with every boat's track, see the annotations you made on the water, and walk through it moment by moment.

Instead of spending an hour piecing together data from different sources, you sit down and it's all there. Organized by race, by leg, by boat. The hard work happened automatically.

Getting started

Option 1: Try it this weekend ($0)

1. Have your sailors download the ChartedSails app on their own iPhones
2. Create a group and schedule a session
3. Have each sailor join the session and mount their phone to the boat
4. Open the live view on your iPad and coach with data

Option 2: Full dedicated setup

1. Get iPhones for your fleet — refurbished works great, even an older model
2. Add protective cases and 3D-printed mounts for your boat class (we can help with designs)
3. Install eSIMs for cellular data — Nomad eSIM, $9 for 3GB / 30 days
4. Pack everything in a suitcase — your portable coaching telemetry kit

Either way, you're sailing with live data in under 30 minutes the first time. After that, it's 5 minutes before each session.

Want to try this with your team?

We're working with a small number of coaching programs to get this right. If you coach a competitive sailing team and this sounds like something that would change your practice, I'd love to talk.

Email me at thomas@chartedsails.com or schedule a 20-minute call. I'll walk you through the setup, answer your questions, and we can figure out if this is a good fit for your program.