After a lot of effort I finally got Virtual Skipper 5 (VS5) to work. The sellers/writers seem to be very disorganised regarding how to buy, downloading the right version etc). But at this point it seems worth it.
VS5 is a sailing simulator that lets you race different boats against simulated boat/s or boats steered by other people on the Net around the world.
I have a friend who has been out on Trek and wants to learn to sail. Because of the limited on the water time we have my plan is to get her to practice racing Vs5 then let her loose steering Trek and see how good the simulation is as training.
So far shes learn't head to wind stops the boat, port and starboard rules (by barging a simulated pommie boat) , pinching upwind slows us down, jib for upwind and spinnaker for downwind. Amazing without even doing it.
Tomorrows a real on the water day we will see the simulation put into practice.....
I thought I'd mention it because when one is stuck at work, or stuck at home breaking out the sailing simulator is a bit of fun :-)
virtualskipper.com/
this is pretty straightforward to get up and running:
www.sailsimulator.com/
by the looks of it development stopped dead on both of these years ago...
I have had many hours of both fun and education with that site rumblefish, I love it.
