Beta · iOS
The app has grown a lot, so here is the whole thing in four steps. Everything else on this page is detail hanging off one of them.
Get a race in. Record on your iPhone or Apple Watch, or import from a Garmin watch, a Vakaros Atlas, or a GPX file. Everything downstream works the same whichever way the data arrived.
It works out what happened. Where the marks were, which leg you were on, what the wind was doing and how it shifted, what each tack cost you. You do not tell it any of that — you tell it the course type, and it reads the rest off your track.
Ask about it. SmartCoach already has the race in front of it. Ask why you lost the second beat and it answers from your actual numbers, not from general sailing advice.
Compare and share. Put a rival’s track alongside your own, follow a handful of boats in your fleet, share a session with your crew, or render the whole picture onto your video.
The short version: record or import a race, and axiotrax turns it into a debrief you can interrogate. Everything else is optional.
The most common feature request is for something already in the app. If you were about to ask for one of these, it is there:
axiotrax takes data from five places: your iPhone’s built-in GPS recorded live, an Apple Watch sailing workout, a Garmin FIT file, a Vakaros Atlas VKX export, or a plain GPX track. All of them feed the same analysis engine — SmartCourse, SmartCoach, the cohort and the video overlay work identically regardless of where the data came from. The only difference is fidelity: an Atlas race arrives with its own gun time and pinged start line, where a GPX track arrives as position alone.
No race of your own yet? An empty Logbook offers Open a Sample Race: a real two-lap windward–leeward on Lake Minnetonka, with its course, marks, tacks and replay. Explore it, then swipe it away whenever you like.
Open the Record tab to start a live GPS session directly from your iPhone. No watch or Garmin required.
Pick the kind of recording first:
Tip: Keep your iPhone somewhere with a clear view of the sky — in a pocket or mount facing up — for best GPS accuracy.
The Racing and Fixed Start screens have two ping buttons: PIN (red) and BOAT (green). Sail to each end of the line and tap the matching button to record its exact GPS position. Either end can be re-pinged at any time — the line just recalculates.
Bow offset: if you ping by sailing the boat past each mark and tapping from the cockpit, set Settings → Start Line → Helm → Bow to the distance in metres from your phone to the bow — DTL then reads for your bow, which is what the race committee sees. If a crew member calls the line from the bow as you tap, leave it at zero.
With an axiotrax display on deck you can do all of this without the phone in your hand: hold the display’s SEQUENCE button to start the countdown and tap it at each end to ping. Ping the pin first, then the committee boat. See the Device Guide.
The axiotrax Apple Watch app records 1Hz GPS sailing workouts with the same data quality as a dedicated Garmin sailing watch. It saves directly to Apple Health — no cables, no extra steps to get the data into axiotrax.
Open the axiotrax app on your Apple Watch.
Set your sequence time and tap Start. The countdown begins. Haptic alerts fire at key intervals and at the gun.
Tap SmartMark at any moment to flag it — these carry through to SmartCoach on iPhone.
End the workout on the watch. The session syncs to Apple Health automatically.
Swipe left from the timer to reach the Start Line screen. Tap PIN at the pin end and BOAT at the committee-boat end. A live distance-to-line readout appears on both the Start Line and countdown screens — green when you're safe, red when you're over. At the gun, a distinct failure haptic warns you if you're OCS. The pinged line imports to iPhone with the session automatically.
On iPhone, tap Apple Watch on the home splash or use the import button in the Logbook. axiotrax reads your recent sailing workouts from Apple Health and imports the one you select — GPS track, SmartMarks, and all.
The Logbook shows all your sessions — newest first. Tap any row to open the detail view, or swipe left to delete.
Tap + in the top-right to import a new FIT file.
A FIT (Flexible and Interoperable Data Transfer) file is the raw data file your Garmin watch creates for every activity — GPS coordinates, speed, heading, and more recorded once per second. axiotrax reads FIT files directly; no Garmin Connect subscription or account required.
GARMIN/Activity. Copy to your device via AirDrop, iCloud Drive, or email.Supported activity types: Sailing, Regatta, and generic GPS activities all work. Quatix, Fenix, Epix, Forerunner, and MARQ watches are fully supported.
Tap Garmin FIT on the home splash, or tap + in the Logbook.
Locate your .fit file in the Files browser and tap it.
axiotrax parses the file, runs SmartCourse analysis, and adds the session to the top of your Logbook.
axiotrax reads the open VKX telemetry format natively, so an Atlas race comes in at full fidelity — not a simplified track. One tap in the Vakaros Connect share sheet is the entire integration.
Open the race in Vakaros Connect and tap Share.
Choose axiotrax from the app list. Bare .vkx, zipped
and gzipped all work.
The race appears in your Logbook, already analysed.
Nothing to configure: Atlas races carry their own gun time and line, so SmartCourse usually needs only the course type from you.
Every tack and gybe plotted on the map. Marks detected automatically — green start, orange windward, blue leeward, red finish.
Heat map grades cool (slow) to warm (fast) so you see where speed was gained or lost instantly.
SmartCourse automatically identifies wind direction, start and finish lines, all rounding marks, every tack and gybe, and your VMG on every leg — no manual input required.
VMG measures how efficiently you're sailing toward or away from the wind. Shown in the stats bar and available as a heat map overlay. Higher upwind VMG means better pointing, less speed loss in tacks, or both.
SmartCourse reads the course off your track, and it is right most of the time. When it is not, you have three corrections and all of them stick — the analysis re-runs against what you told it, and re-detection will not overwrite you.
Open the full-screen map, tap the mark you want to move, then scrub the playback slider to the moment you actually rounded it and confirm. The mark moves there permanently. Use this when a mark landed on the wrong side of a wide rounding, or when GPS wandered at the buoy.
Kept recording on the sail home? Scrub to the moment you crossed the line and tap the checkered flag. The finish moves there, and axiotrax stops reading the course at that point — so your trip back to the dock is no longer mistaken for another lap. Tap the cross beside it to undo. Setting the finish deletes nothing; the sail home is still in the recording.
To remove it, open the session’s gear icon and go to Track → Trim After Finish. It keeps 30 seconds past the line and trims the rest, which tidies the speed heat map and the ladder. Undo Trim puts it all back. Keep Trimmed, Free the Space makes it permanent.
If the committee moved the sequence and your timer didn’t follow, open the gear icon, tap Start → Set the Actual Start and enter the time the race really started, as read off the course board. Everything tied to the start follows it: the line, distance to line, VMG and which cohort boats count as the same race. Use the Recorded Start goes back.
If axiotrax cannot confidently locate your marks it places none of them and tells you how many it found, rather than scattering half a course on the map. That message almost always means the Course Type below is set to something you did not sail. Change it and the course re-detects immediately.
Each session has its own settings, under the gear icon on the session screen. They apply to that session only.
Each name spells out the marks in order: W is windward, L leeward, R a reach.
Turn on Use RC wind bearing and enter the bearing the committee announced. SmartCourse uses it instead of its own wind estimate for all VMG and tack calculations.
axiotrax automatically fetches hourly wind data from Open-Meteo using your activity's GPS location and time. Two samples are collected — near the start and near the end of your session. Fetched data is persisted and available offline on subsequent views.
Priority: RC Wind Bearing takes precedence over API wind for all calculations. API wind is still shown for reference.
If your boat has instruments, axiotrax can read them live: true wind, boat speed through the water, heading and depth, from an NMEA 0183 gateway on the boat over Wi-Fi. Turn it on in Settings → Instruments and enter the gateway’s address and port. Measured wind then replaces the forecast everywhere — the replay, the video overlay, the coach and the display. Boat instruments are part of axiotrax Pro.
Stay on the boat’s Wi-Fi. The gateway has no internet, so iPhone may try to hop to cellular. Turn off Settings → Cellular → Wi-Fi Assist and allow Local Network access for axiotrax.
A polar is your boat’s target speed for each wind speed and angle. Start by picking your class in Settings → SmartCoach → Boat Class. The library covers the common racing classes, including the Catalina Capri 25. Class polars are typical figures for the design; your own boat will differ.
For your boat’s own numbers, import its ORC VPP certificate. SmartCoach then has precise target speeds for the conditions you actually raced in.
Download your boat's ORC certificate PDF from the ORC database or your yacht club measurer.
In Settings → SmartCoach, tap Import ORC Certificate (PDF) and select the PDF. Sister ships share a class certificate, so you name the boat after the import.
axiotrax parses the polar table. SmartCoach can now tell you "you were at 78% of polar VMG on that upwind leg."
The map on the activity detail screen shows your full GPS track with an animated boat marker you can scrub with the playback slider. It opens oriented course-up, so the windward mark is at the top and the leeward at the bottom, whichever way the course actually lies.
Tap the map mode button to colour the track by speed, VMG, or lift and knock. The last of those is the interesting one: it colours the track by whether you were lifted or headed at that moment relative to the leg’s own baseline wind, so a well-sailed beat reads mostly green with thin red slivers just before each tack — you tacked on the headers. Fat red means you held one.
Turn on Ladder for rungs drawn square to the wind and laylines into the windward mark. Both follow the wind as it shifts through the replay.
Tap the expand icon to open the full-screen map. To set a custom finish time: scrub to the finish moment, tap the flag icon. Tap again to clear it and restore SmartCourse's automatic detection.
The span button cycles how much of the track is drawn bright around the boat: ±30s, ±2m, Leg or All. The rest of the race stays on the map, ghosted, so you keep its shape. With several boats replaying at once, a short span is what makes a single moment readable.
SmartCoach is your AI sailing coach. It reads your complete race data — GPS track, speed, VMG, every tack and gybe, leg splits, wind conditions, and any notes you've added — then debriefs you on what actually happened. Ask it anything.
Tap the chat bubble icon on the activity detail screen. On iPad, SmartCoach opens as a side panel alongside the map — ask questions while scrubbing the track.
Ask about a specific leg, tack, mark rounding, or the breeze, and you'll see the coach pull the data live — a brief "Analyzing your tacks…" indicator appears while it queries your actual GPS record, then it answers with your numbers. It doesn't guess; it looks it up.
Set up your profile in Settings → Sailor Profile. The more context you give SmartCoach — experience level, role, crew names and positions — the more specific its coaching becomes. "Tell Mike to ease the traveler" rather than "tell your trimmer."
In Settings, set your priority — Speed & Trim, Balanced, or Tactics & VMG — and add a free-text note about what you're working on. SmartCoach reads both and shapes every debrief around them.
Tap the notes icon on the detail screen before opening SmartCoach. Notes can include conditions, fleet size, result, or anything else the GPS can't tell it. SmartCoach reads these as part of its context for every conversation.
Access: SmartCoach comes with axiotrax Pro: unlimited coaching, no setup needed.
One boat’s track cannot tell you whether you were slow or whether the wind was light where you happened to be. A cohort can. When several boats in the same fleet record the same race, the fleet becomes the reference you measure against.
Cohort works on private links, not accounts. In Settings → Curated Cohort, tap Share My Follow Link and send that link to the boats you want benchmarking against you. Anyone who opens it can see the races you publish, and appears in your Followers list. Remove someone there and their access ends immediately.
The link is the key. It is unguessable, so only people you send it to can find it — but treat it like a key and only share it with boats you trust.
With Auto-publish on, races you sail are published to your followers automatically. Publish All My Races to Cohort backfills your whole history at once — useful after a fresh install, or so a boat that follows you later inherits your back catalogue. Published races carry your boat name, sail number, class and PHRF rating so the comparison is fair.
Open a race and tap cohort to load another boat’s track over your own. Both boats replay together on the map, and axiotrax reports where the gains and losses actually happened — at the start, at each tack, and at the mark — measured in boat lengths along the course axis rather than in raw distance.
Boats match as the same race when their guns are within 30 seconds of yours and they started within 300 m of you. You can pick up to six boats to follow closely. The rest of that race’s fleet is drawn in grey with their names, so you can see where everyone else went; turn off Show the rest of the fleet to see only your picks.
Turn on Ladder in the playback map for rungs drawn square to the wind and laylines into the windward mark. The rungs are lines of equal progress to windward, so two boats on the same rung are level however far apart they are on the water. Both follow the wind as it shifts during the replay, which is the clearest way to see a race change hands on a windshift.
Cohort races stay separate. Races pulled from boats you follow live apart from your own Logbook — they never mix with your sessions.
Share any session with your crew so they can open it on their own iPhone and ask SmartCoach questions from their perspective — what they saw at the bow, how the trim felt, what happened on the leeward mark.
Go to Settings → Sailor Profile → Crew Members. Add each crew member's name, position, and an email or phone number. Contact info is used to find their iCloud account and deliver the share invitation.
Open the session and tap the crew icon (two people) in the toolbar.
Select which crew members to invite and tap Share.
Crew with matched iCloud accounts receive an invitation. For others, you get a share link to send via Messages or AirDrop.
Crew members tap the iCloud notification or the share link. The session downloads and appears in their Logbook. Shared sessions are read-only — crew can view the track and ask SmartCoach questions, but cannot edit the session.
Requires iCloud: Both owner and crew need to be signed into iCloud. The axiotrax app must be installed on the crew member's device.
Import the clip and axiotrax lines it up with your track using the video’s own timestamp. That is all most footage needs.
Clips sent through Messages, WhatsApp or most chat apps arrive stripped of their creation time, and some DJI exports lose it too. Rather than making you guess an offset, axiotrax lets you pin the video to your track. Tap Align to Race, scrub the video to a moment you can recognise — the gun, a mark rounding, a tack — then step frame by frame to the exact one. Find the same moment on the track, by scrubbing or by pinching and dragging the map, and confirm. Named moments from the race are offered as shortcuts so you can jump straight to the start or a rounding rather than hunting.
The pin is exact, even when the clip starts before your recording does. It is remembered, so a second attempt starts from the first. If the timing still looks off, Time Adjust nudges it by a second, 30 seconds or 5 minutes.
The same works for photos: pin a photo to the point on the track where it was taken.
axiotrax stamps speed, VMG, compass heading, a live track map, and race leg onto every frame of your sailing footage — frame-precise, automatically synced to your GPS data.
Select your video from the Photos library using the video picker on the detail screen.
axiotrax matches it to your track from the clip’s timestamp. If the timestamp is gone, it asks you to pin it, as above.
Tap Preview 15 s to check the sync. The preview is exactly what the export will be.
Tap Create Overlay. The finished video saves to your Photos library.
Pro vs. Free: Free exports are clips of up to 15 seconds with the axiotrax mark — the app picks the best 15 seconds for you. Pro exports the whole race, with your own team logo and boat name and no mark.
On iPad the replay and SmartCoach sit side by side: the track fills one panel while your data, overlay controls and SmartCourse analysis scroll in the other. It is the best screen for a post-race debrief with the crew around it.
axiotrax runs on Apple silicon Macs, which is the easiest way to review a long day of racing and render video. Recording and Apple Watch import are hidden there — the Mac is for reviewing, not for capturing.
axiotrax can drive a sunlight-readable display on deck: a countdown and a drawing of the start line before the gun, then course, speed and lift/knock while you race. Your phone does all the work and the display shows the result, so it is useful without the phone in your hand. You build it yourself from about $55 of parts, and the firmware and case files are open source. Pair one at Settings → Remote Display.
See the build → · How to use it →
Per-activity vs. global: Settings sets the defaults for new imports. Each session’s gear icon overrides them for that session only.