How can I easily loose 73 places or more at the end of the VLM Vendee Race?
What happened? I ran aground. I sent a good route to finish the race to the
autopilot using VBVMG. I did not check that the last waypoint went between the gates and woke up the next morning with the boat hard against the French shore. I had to create a new route to finish and
lost 75 places.
Why did this happen? The boat probably made it to the waypoint, but did not cross the finish, so what happened afterwards? Once the boat reached the waypoint, it appears it continued sailing, but in what direction? Was it still using VBMG? Why wouldn't it have gone towards the finish line (next waypoint) or perhaps just stopped at the end of the route and sent an
alarm? Does the program have some of these choices?
Answer from Maitai: The VLM My Waypoint
documentation states:
"If no value has been filled, your Way Point (WP) is the next mark, provided lat,long are entered as '0'. When you complete (lat, lon) values in the 2 text boxes, the next race mark is forgotten until you reach your waypoint. "
First of all, a WP is considered as 'reached'' in VLM when the distance beween the boat and the WP is less or equal to the distance the boat sailed during the previous crank (vacation). So in fact the WP is always reached *before* the boat hits it.
After a WP is reached, what happens depends on how the WP has been set-up:
If there is a "Heading-to-follow-after-WP", then the boat will be set in heading mode with this value. Nice, but if the
wind happens to come from that direction, you might not move a lot...
If there is no such value defined in the WP (i.e. it has been set to "-1"), then the boat will keep the same
navigation mode (VBVMG, VMG or ORTHO) as the one it had before reaching the WP, using that mode toward the closest point of the next race gate. Nice again, but if there is land between the boat and the next gate that might create problems
Follow up:
There is no way to find out, but I unknowingly probably had pilot instructions set on a "Heading-to-follow-after-WP" because the boat went ashore, rather than ''-1 '' to continue to the closest side of the next race gate (the finish)!
There is an option in qtVlm for that and probably this is what happened to you. By default qtVlm will set "heading-to-follow" with the last direction that the boat was sailing when the WP was reached and deactivated.