Ultimate Online Racing

[oobie]

As a cat sailor who's been without a boat for some time, I was pretty excited about discovering Virtual Skipper, an absolutely amazing regatta simulator that puts you on the water, in fully rendered locations around the world and racing against other virtual skippers like yourself.

Check out Virtual Skipper here:

http://www.virtualskipper-game.com/en/

Check out the Gallery to see what it really looks like while you're racing, the graphics are truly unbelievable.

You can also view video footage from the recent Australian Championships:

YouTube compresses the footage pretty heavily unfortunately, but you can imagine what it looks like on your PC

You can make your own "skins" ie. sail and hull designs, create your own courses and if you're good with 3D, you can even create new boats for Virtual Skipper. Virtual Skipper comes with 4 boats by default:

- ACC

- Open60 Tri

- Offshore Cruiser

- Melges24

So far, the following boats have been made by Virtual Skipper users:

- AC90

- Fireball

- Groupama 3

- Libera A

- Foiler Moth

- Musto Skiff

- Orange II Cat

- ORMA Tri

- RC44

- Star

- Swan 45

- TP52

- Volvo 70

There are a few new boats still in production at this point:

- Mini 6.5

- 49'er

- Maxi

- Tornado

You can race in fleet, match and team races and there are excellent events run in these three modes including:

Australian Championships...

2008 Title Holder - Aus26 (Brenton O'Brien from QLD)

World Match Racing Championships...

2007 Title Holder - Sunburn (France)

World Team Racing Championships...

2007 Title Holder - VSK Russia

After meeting a number of Aussies in races, I decided to build a club and website to organise regattas and share knowledge and so I founded VSK Australia about two and half years ago.

http://www.vsk-aus.com

There is a link in the left column of the VSK Australia site where you can buy Virtual Skipper, it costs about $50 and I can honestly say that I have never had so much value from $50 ever. This thing has almost taken over my life!

Virtual Skipper has an excellent built in umpire which hands out penalties during racing and is a fantastic way to improve rule knowledge. Honestly, I thought my rule knowledge was OK from sailing my cat for a few years, but after using Virtual Skipper and being part of some very large regattas, my rule knowledge has improved tenfold.

I could go on and on here because Virtual Skipper and the communities that have evolved around it are huge topics in themselves, but that would take hours so I'd just like to invite everyone to come to www.vsk-aus.com and register there, ask questions in the forum, meet other virtual skippers and if you like what you see, join us in virtual sailing heaven

Ask questions here as well, I still check these forums out and daydream about buying another "real" boat.