Helm Sailing — Support

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Helm is built by one person. Email me directly and you will usually hear back within a couple of days.

Contact

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Troubleshooting

My speed reads 0.0 and won't move.

Helm reads speed from GPS movement, so a boat at her mooring — or a phone on a desk — reads zero, and that is correct rather than broken. Check the fix-quality indicator: Helm shows a poor fix honestly instead of hiding it behind a plausible-looking number.

The watch and phone disagree about who is recording.

They cannot both record, by design — one recorder, one set of numbers. If the watch is tracking, the phone's START is disabled and says so. Stop the session on the watch if you want to record on the phone instead.

A sail didn't arrive on my phone.

The summary is queued by the system and arrives even if the phone app was closed, but the full-rate track follows as a separate file transfer and can lag behind it. Open both apps with the devices near each other and give it a moment.

Conditions show an old timestamp.

That is the design. Offline, Helm keeps the last reading and stamps its age rather than showing a spinner or a blank — an hour-old wind reading is still useful, and knowing it is an hour old is what makes it safe to use. It refreshes when you have a connection.

My polar looks wrong, or says the engine was on.

If your 90th-percentile upwind speed is implausibly high for the wind band, the boat was almost certainly under power. Helm flags that rather than presenting it to you as sailing performance. Wind angles come from modelled wind, not a masthead instrument, so treat them as indicative.

How do I get my data out, or delete it?

Settings exports every recorded track as GPX, which any race-analysis tool will read. The same screen erases everything — sessions, tracks and the polar — including the copy in your private iCloud database.

Requirements

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