Online sailing regatta simulator — THE BALTIC LAP, a one-design race round the whole Baltic in real wind, in your browser

Most of us get a handful of races a season, on one boat, in one bay, in whatever wind turns up. The tactical sense a long race teaches — reading the forecast, choosing a side, holding a wind angle through the shifts, tacking for the layline — needs weeks of sea time most skippers never get. THE BALTIC LAP gives you that race: one fleet of identical ELEONORAs (30 ft one-design cruiser), nineteen legs round the entire Baltic, the real forecast wind, sailed on the server at ×1 around the clock. Join it now, in the browser, from your phone too.

What it trains

The lap is a race of orders, as on a long passage under autopilot. There is no hand steering: every boat is sailed on the server by what you tell her, and sails on while you are away. It trains the thinking:

• Wind strategy over days. The MET Norway forecast at about a hundred points round the Baltic, refreshed every half hour: read where the wind will be, pick your side of a 200-mile leg and live with it.
• Holding a wind angle. HOLD WIND ANGLE (LOCK WIND) keeps the true wind angle you set, ±1° / ±5°; HOLD HEADING keeps a compass course, ±1° / ±10°.
• Tacking and gybing on the laylines. TACK and GYBE are one order each; the console draws LAYLINES to the next mark and a WIND SHIFT gauge — lift or header, the favoured tack.
• Sail choice. MAIN, GENOA, KITE, reefing, goose-winging, AUTO TRIM or a sheet eased and trimmed by hand; the autopilot shows the percentage of ELEONORA's polar you make.
• Mark roundings. Every city mark is left to port. The COURSE line leads to a point two lengths off the mark on the correct side and an arc shows the way round. She never rounds a mark by herself — the turn is yours.
• The start. The committee boat flies the class flag, P and X; the console shows DTL, TTL, BURN and the line bias. Over early: back below the line and start again.
• Reading the fleet. The FLEET list shows every boat's gap along the route with a green ▲ or red ▼ — gaining on the boat ahead or losing to her. Back after a night's sleep, a toast tells you how far she sailed and the places gained or lost.
• A navigator's instruments. The chart's DATA BAR is a plotter's — five tiles, SOG · COG · BTW · DTW · VMG, measured along the sea route to the next mark; INSTR adds % OF POTENTIAL, ETA, POSITION and WIND TREND.

The idea

We built the regatta like a round-the-coast rally, not a club sprint. One race, THE BALTIC LAP, is always on. The course is clockwise: Rīga → Kolka → Gdańsk → Rostock → Kiel → Gilleleje → København → Bornholm → Karlskrona → Kalmar → Visby → Stockholm → Mariehamn → Umeå → Kemi → Vaasa → Helsinki → St Petersburg → Tallinn → Rīga — 19 legs, some 2 350 NM as the crow flies and about 2 700 NM along the sea routes, three to four weeks for a 30 ft one-design cruiser.

The first leg is deliberately 58 NM of open water, from the line off Daugavgrīva to the Kolka buoy: ten to twelve hours before an unattended boat can reach land, so a skipper who starts at the evening gun and goes to bed wakes still at sea. Where a straight line would cross land the chart draws a dashed sea route round it; distance to go, VMG, ETA and the live ranking are measured along it. Only the coast counts; depths do not.

The committee's rules:

• Join at the tail, any time. Before a lap's gun you wait in the start area. After it, your ELEONORA is put behind the last boat still actively racing, on her leg, at the race clock as it is — day or night, for as long as the lap lasts. A late boat can still finish first.
• One order from the committee, never another. A joining boat is given one heading towards the next mark; every turn after that is yours. A boat nobody has steered sails straight on, passes no mark, and after 48 hours aground is DNF for that leg only — SAIL ON puts her back behind the fleet.
• The 48-hour control time. When the first boat finishes at Rīga, a control time of 48 hours starts. Then the table freezes: finishers by time, boats still at sea by legs done and distance to go — nobody is DNF for being slow. Ten minutes later the next lap's gun goes, everybody carried to the start.
• No LATE rule. Far behind the active group you may JUMP TO THE ACTIVE GROUP — your choice. Only a boat stopped at the shore for a whole day is put back at the tail.
• The boats never touch. Server-sailed boats pass through each other — no right-of-way protests; tactics decide. Leg results (the order past each mark) are kept in a LEGS column; the position decides.

The race tells you where you are

Every mark is a real port or cape with its own card in REGATTA INFO, and a card pops up as you pass the most interesting places. Round KOLKA and you learn it is Kolkasrags, where the Gulf of Riga meets the open sea. KIEL has its sailing week and the start of the Kiel Canal; KØBENHAVN is passed down the Sound past Kronborg; BORNHOLM is Denmark's granite island of round churches and Hammershus castle; KALMAR is where the Kalmar Union was made in 1397; STOCKHOLM's mark at Sandhamn sits at the edge of 30 000 islands; MARIEHAMN keeps the four-masted barque Pommern; KEMI has the icebreaker Sampo and the snow castle; TALLINN's Hanseatic old town stands on its limestone hill. By the finish you know the Baltic as sailors do — by its capes, straits and harbour lights.

The first of many laps

THE BALTIC LAP is great fun — a whole sea in one race — and the first of many. The next lap will be somewhere else in the world: this is how we explore it, one sea at a time.

The vessels you do it on

The regatta is one-design: ELEONORA, a 30 ft one-design cruiser, for everybody — the same hull, sails, spinnaker, autopilot and AUTO TRIM, no handicap. The prototype sails on the Daugava: 9.14 m overall, 2.96 m beam, 1.55 m draught, 3 300 kg with 1 550 kg of lead in a fin keel, tiller steering, a 15.9 m² main and a 28 m² genoa. In 12 knots true she makes about 4.7 kn at 40° to the wind, 6.2 kn on a beam reach and 4.35 kn dead downwind — so VMG, not boat speed, decides every leg. Heeled too far under the kite she broaches, as the real boat would.

The other twenty-one vessels — from the Optimist and the ILCA 7 through LATEKO (50 ft cruiser), the Namejs catamaran, the AC75 foiler, Libava and the fast motor yacht SPRINT to the pilot boat, the tanker, the cruise ship, the tugs, the PSV, the CTV and the survey catamaran LOTE — are for Free Mode, the drills and the lessons, not for the lap. LATEKO's sail model is ELEONORA's made bigger, so what you learn racing carries over. In the race a ship or two will pass — can you tell what she is at night, by her lights alone?

The sea is real

The lap sails on the simulator's real sea: the coastline and islands of the whole Baltic — Gotland, Öland, Bornholm, the Estonian islands, the Swedish and Finnish archipelagos, the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia, the Danish straits and the Kattegat — with the major lighthouses lit at night. The sky is real: the sun where it stands, the real moon and stars. The wind is the MET Norway forecast, the same for every boat at the same place and time; the weather follows it — cloud, rain, snow, fog and the visibility they leave. The lap sails in still water, so the wind alone decides; entering a regatta puts any practice wind back to REAL.

In Free Mode the simulator goes further: the Gulf of Riga in full detail with its 107 real harbours, any of about 2,000 Baltic harbours as a start, sea state, CURRENT, radar and AIS, the OpenSeaMap chart with CPA/TCPA on every target, and COLREG traffic that gives way as the rules say.

Shared sea — other real people on the water

Logged in, SHARED SEA is on by default — one live sea for everyone at ×1 — and you can switch it off: outside the race, the boats you meet are other skippers', sailed by real people now. The regatta fleet are real people too — every ELEONORA in the FLEET list has a skipper somewhere, asleep or awake; three slow boats marked "· SPARRING" make sure there is always a tail to overtake.

Classroom and the scenario builder

With ✎ SCENARIO BUILDER an instructor builds an exercise over the chart — the place, the own vessel and her start, time and weather on any date, other vessels with AIS names, types and routes, areas and triggers — and ⇗ MAKE A LINK packs the whole scenario into a link, nothing stored on our server. 🎓 CLASSROOM → TEACH opens a private class of up to 30 students on one sea, with a code and a link; the instructor can inject fog, a wind change or an engine failure, pause everybody, message them and print a summary. A club can brief the week's leg in class and let the students race it from home.

Who it is for

Leisure and professional alike. The charter skipper who wants the first day of the holiday to feel like the fifth, the club sailor keeping an eye in over the winter, the family learning on one boat together — and, on the same sea, the cadet before the first watch, the deck officer brushing up the rules, the instructor who needs a situation the whole class can see. Nothing here is "for beginners only" or "for professionals only": the sea, the rules and the boat's behaviour are the same for everyone, and the simulator judges every run by the same standard.

How to start

Free Mode is open to everyone — no account needed — with the 15 m motor yacht and the 50 ft cruiser LATEKO at up to TIME ×10; every other vessel, the docking, sailing and ECDIS units, the scenario builder and Classroom TEACH come with the simulator subscription; students join shared scenarios free. SHARED SEA and the regatta need a free SkipperCheck login.

• To race, log in, open /regatta, join and NAME YOUR BOAT (name, home port, flag); each skipper sails one boat and is scored by it. On a phone, the MOBILE CONSOLE (skippercheck.net/regatta/console) has CHART with the five-tile data bar, INSTR, AUTOPILOT and SAILS on one screen, and notifications for the gun, a mark rounded, the shore ahead, a new forecast, the finish.
• HOLD WIND ANGLE, the Code Zero and AUTO SAILS come with the simulator subscription — or for a month when a friend you invited (FLEET → 🤝 INVITE A FRIEND) joins.
• Our main product is the VHF course (€199, /vhf-course) — "Charter Ready": the VHF certificate plus simulator practice.

FAQ

Do I have to be online while my boat races?

No. She sails on the server, holding the heading or wind angle you gave her. Close the tab, come back from any device.

I joined three days after the gun. Have I lost already?

No. You start behind the last boat still actively racing; the marks before it count as passed, and places are by position when the table freezes.

What if my boat runs aground while I sleep?

Close to the shore she rounds up and waits for a new heading; the console warns of THE SHORE AHEAD. A steered boat is never DNF for it — give her a new order and sail on.

Join the race

The fleet is out there now, between Rīga and Rīga. See the live table and join at skippercheck.net/regatta — on your phone, skippercheck.net/regatta/console.

Related reading

• Sailing simulator — sail trim, tacks, gybes, reefing and the kites in today's real wind, in the browser
• Shared sea simulator — one live sea for every skipper, with today's real wind, weather and COLREG for real
• COLREG simulator — 54 collision-avoidance exercises on a radar, AIS and bridge-view console, in the browser
• ELEONORA — the one-design 30 ft cruiser of THE BALTIC LAP, in the browser
• All articles · Open the simulator

Boat types are described generically; SkipperCheck is not affiliated with any boat builder or class association.