Courtesy of FullPower

Laying tracks across a big, blue sea: Pegasus 50's record-breaking run in the 2009 Transpac is recorded on the author's iPhone.

It wasn't long ago when we'd get on our boats and stash our phones somewhere nice and dry, pulling them out occasionally-if ever-to check in with the home, office, or nearby airport for real-time wind reports. Some of you might've even left your phone or PDA in the car because it was of no use on the boat. Not anymore. We now carry our phones with us everywhere-for me, it's an iPhone 3GS, which is a powerful phone and an invaluable sailing tool. With a built-in GPS, magnetic compass, and accelerometer, as well as a highly readable multi-touch screen, thousands of applications, and accessories that include waterproof cases and solar chargers, the iPhone is a complete solution for sailors. It is now my navigation station and much, much more.

The iPhone 3GS is the only phone in existence that gives you an accurate compass when operating in a fully connected environment. We all know how important headings are when sailing, and particularly when racing. Using the iPhone as a navigational tool, I also no longer need to worry about finding or sharing my geographic positions.

For charting, there are excellent, inexpensive offerings, such as Navionics and iNavX, which allow you to download and use the same navigational charts that you would use with a much more expensive, fixed chartplotter. There are also numerous tide applications such as Aye Tides. For wind information, iWindsurf and its free Wind Alert application are hard to beat-it's all there on your phone, so you need not go searching for it.
In the interest of full disclosure, my company, fullpower, built a navigational application called MotionX-GPS Sport for my own use, so naturally, this is the one application I use for all my navigation these days. This is not to be confused with MotionX-GPS Drive, our other iPhone application, which will guide you turn-by-turn to the yacht club to change into your gear, but no farther.
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Literally hundreds of applications are developed for the iPhone every day, and even as you read this, I may be using some of them in addition to MotionX, but for now, let me share with you what I'm really using my iPhone for. It's always with me and I'm always connected worldwide, so these applications apply in San Francisco, Honolulu, Porto Cervo, Key West, or La Rochelle.

The MotionX function we (Team Pegasus) use most often is the track recorder, which keeps records of all of our sailing. On the way in from the races or a practice session, I automatically share the day's tracks and waypoints with the entire team so they can review them later onshore.

It's amazing what we learn from our tracks. We can see the shifts that we missed, and, if we're doing a two-boat practice and both teams are recording their tracks, we can better understand and review what happened and when. By analyzing the GPX file (GPS Exchange Format, which is a data format used for the interchange of GPS data -waypoints, routes, and tracks-between applications and web services on the Internet), we can check for boatspeed differences and persistent geographic shifts. By collecting this same data as we sail a similar course on different days, we can accumulate know-how on local knowledge, have it all in our logbook to review at the debrief, or at the end of the season.