Matthew's blog

GPS spoofing sends a yacht off course

In the news this week, we have a case of life imitating Hollywood.

In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond's nemesis-of-the-week spoofed a GPS signal to send a British warship into Chinese waters, while its captain and crew thought it was still on the right side of the border. Now, a University of Texas team has (with the skipper's permission) done exactly the same thing to a superyacht cruising the Med.

Dynamic Stability of a Monohull in a Beam Sea

The last post in our series on yacht stability looked at the static case. We saw that a yacht's response to heeling forces can be described by a stability curve, the shape of which tells us a lot about the boat's purpose, sailing characteristics and seaworthiness.

A real yacht in a real situation is of course far from being a static case. The static stability curve is one of our best tools for quantitatively comparing different designs, and I don't mean to denigrate its importance. In practice, though, dynamic factors can often have a bigger effect on the actual stability of the boat as it relates to safety, seaworthiness and comfort.

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