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What’s The Wind Doing at The Club?? Do You Wear an Apple Watch ??

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Wondering what rig you should use today ?? There is simply no better option than looking at the windsock and figuring it out. Do you carry an anemometer in the car?? It’ll sound mad, I know, but I’ve kept one in the car for about 20 years. It cost about a tenner, so it doesn’t owe me anything! The windsock plus an anemometer is great !!

Then I discovered this, on my three year old Apple Watch.

I don’t know how many of us wear an Apple Watch. Quite a few…. Probably at least Apple and Samsung watches can do this trick.

In the photo above, that’s the wind speed and direction at our Club (Datchet) right now. Gust speeds when I check them are usually double the stated number, so easy to remember. So right now it’s 17mph gusting 30-35mph. Quite a lot!

If you have an Apple Watch and this is news to you, like it is to me, then this is how you do it:-

  1. Go to your main Apple weather app which is on the phone when you buy it by default. The icon is a weather cloud with the sun peeping out behind it.
  2. Make sure your Club is a chosen, selected and stored location.
  3. Now go to the Apple Watch app and do two steps

Go to the Weather app that is INSIDE the Apple Watch app. Select your club location from the list. At Datchet for example, I use “Heathrow” – see above.

Ok – now the weather app is set, all you have to do is display it on the watch.

  1. Most watch faces have little gadgets or widgets, but for the watches they call them “complications”. Obviously the tech people created the name before the marketing people could stop them. Probably whatever design of watch face that you have selected in “my watch” will have two or more complications available. In my example above, I am using the California type watch face. You can see at the bottom that two complications are available. I’ve decided to use the “sub-dial bottom” complication for weather.

If you click on that sub-dial field, you get offered a huge choice but page through to “weather”.

There’s a good few options even for “weather” and select “wind”.

And you get the watch face you see at the top.

Using “Program Mixing” or “Power Mixing” on Futaba T6K….!!

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A few days ago, we published a piece on a relatively advanced idea of using the Program Mixer function (also known as “Channel Mixers” and “Power Mixers”) and on the Futaba menu it is shown as “P.MIX”.

We have a feeling that maybe only recent Futaba T6K transmitters have P.MIX software built in. My own transmitter is a T6K Version 3. It has P.MIX. The manual that came with the transmitter in 2023 turns out to be a manual for Version 2…. so no P.MIX instructions.

We’ve looked online for a version 3 manual without success, so far.

If you want to read up about P.MIX instructions, what you do is find a manual online for the T10J transmitter. The “Program Mixing” instruction pages start at Page 53. The T6K seems to have the first four channel mixers, though not the 5th and 6th mixer (with curves) that the T10J transmitter has. So if you feel happier using a Futaba manual as you tweak, then use these pages to guide you.

Sunday 7th July at Datchet – Saving the Launching Platform…!!

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Unexpectedly we had rather a great day at Datchet on Sunday. So many people are racing away, we only had four Marbleheads out and the weather was a challenge. (I did discover embarrassingly that my shorts go transparent when drenched by rain… 😦 … twice…)

We had B rigs on, did maybe five races or so before the strong breeze collapsed to zero. We invested in more tea and coffee, but actually the company was great and the chatter even better. For myself, I needed a fair bit of advice (tacking in a breeze without coming to a dead halt!) and my fellow club mates were falling over themselves to help.

Club management was quick to point out that we had lost one of our two launching platforms in last week’s summer gales. Impossibly the platform started life to the north of the RIB pontoon, and ended up rammed and jammed under the south side. A mystery that is.

Two of our amazing radio sailors immediately piled in and dislodged the thing… wrestling it to the shore. Next Job was to haul it out of harm’s way with the Club Jeep.

A roller wheel has parted from the leg nearest the camera. However, our Sailing Secretary has recovered it from further around the bay. It looks repairable.

Great news!!