Our yacht wasn’t winning races. To find out why, we looked for some software to help us analyse our performance. Although there were a lot of sophisticated chart plotters on the market there didn’t seem to be anything that would allow us to carry out that kind of classic data analysis. What we wanted to do was drag the data out of the Navigation and GPS system and manipulate the data in a analysis tool like Excel. It didn’t sound that hard so why wasn’t anyone doing it?
Fortunately we were running a software development consultancy so had the expertise to start developing what we needed ourselves. We began reading up on NMEA data standards and before long the concepts that lie behind Rockit had started to evolve. After a number of years hard graft, what you see described on these pages was ready to take to the battle field that is big boat racing. Take a look at our blog to see the results we have achieved by utilising our software. Each year the data collector evolves, and Ashtree Marine was setup to make the data collector software available to a wider audience.