Perhaps as much as anything else is that this particular J35 - formerly Ballyhoo - has an up-scale instrument package already installed. There is a quite complete Ockam kit with six displays and a central processor. We'll need to purchase and install a NMEA interface so that the data we gather can be collected for analysis on a laptop computer.

There are two readouts in the cockpit:

And 4 under the mast:


These are all interchangeable - any display can show any of the many data functions. Perhaps more important than anything else is the polars that are captured in the system - knowledge of the theoretical speed for any wind speed and angle. This, combined with a capture of the wind direction and speed and the GPS plot of the course sailed will give us huge amounts of data against which to develop our software tools.