Beat This!

We’d never seen it before, but in April’s Sightings, we featured a story about love on the water. Robert Bauman and Claudia Allison sent in the following photo of their track from a carefully plotted Valentine’s Day sail a few years ago.

It got us thinking. Could we start an unofficial competition for different categories of courses that are sailed both manually and — because we live in tech heaven — by inputting a pre-plotted course on your autopilot so that the boat steers its way through the desired design, while the sailors just have to trim the sheets? Why should skywriters have all the fun?

What else might you sail?

We would assume that new rules of the Bay would give the right of way to anyone attempting to sail a complicated line drawing on their chartplotter (we’re talking to you, container ships). And please, no x-rated designs!