Polar diagram

[harpon]

Hi there,

I have a Tayana 48DS and I am looking for a polar diagram or table for my boat. Any ideas as to where I could get one. I have tried several sites with no luck.

Thanks,

Harpon

[hellosailor]

Does the maker still exist?
Is there an owners' association?
Here in the US, the quickest source is USSA, the national sailing organization. They sell polars (not cheap) to folks interested in racing their boats.

When you have a boat that isn't typically raced, polars are scarce. It is possible to develop your own, by setting everything on the boat "right" and then sailing, noting, logging many data points, but that's not a trivial exercise.

There also used to be a VPP calculator (in Excel form) lurking about on the web, but that's somewhat generic and although it allows for many things, it is still "paper" versus real world.

[Matt Johnson]

The SailTimer wind gauge is suppose to be able to make a polar diagram for your boat after it has been used for awhile. I haven't played with mine yet, so don't know how accurate it is.

Matt

[hellosailor]

And they bury that interesting nugget in their web site instead of mentioning it on their main product page?!

If they are doing polars at all accuracy, there are people who would buy their instrument JUST to get that feature. Hit 'em up for a piece to review! (And then of course, you'd still have to check the results.)

If they can just take the math out of "should I be gybing off or running wing on wing?" it would still be worth the price of admission.

I'm not at all sure any program can generate accurate polars without a lot of manual input (i.e. where you reefed yesterday? heeled? crew on the rail? water tanks full?) but even crude polars beat rolling the dice.