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Comment by slowhand09 | Hacker News Reader

"Where we could plan down to the minute of when to make course and sailplan changes."

As a racing sailor I get that you can PLAN when to do these things, but Windy isn't giving you info from models accurate enough for this to be optimal. It just make you feel good and the picture are pretty.

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This clearly is not sufficient for inland racing but I can absolutely see how it would be for sailing long distances.

However it would be really cool to see something like this at a much more detailed resolution. I've been using this model for currents for the last 14 years: http://hudson.dl.stevens-tech.edu/maritimeforecast/maincontr... It would be more legible if it used windy's visualizations.

If you have wind, polars, currents, and sea states you should have a good grasp at where you're boat will be and at what time.

Also, the closer you are to your start time the better the model. If I go sailing in the next 30 minutes, the model is really damn accurate.

at ~9km resolution they may be accurate but I doubt you can plan things down to the minute or even have any certainty of what weather conditions to expect near shore where terrain will greatly affect the flow of 10m winds. also Windy only works over a strong network connection so during actual passages it isn't really that helpful (compared wx gribs which can typically be downloaded over ham radio)

All that being said, Windy is an amazing product, and definitely a boon for visualizing model data and making that accessible to anyone with a decent internet connection!

source: thousands of miles of single-handed ocean sailing and I also handle wx model data daily at my job.

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