Find Greta’s arrival time in Portugal / Spain.
Important – select full screen mode for smooth interactive performance (bottom-right double headed arrow). Click centre of < 2 of 15 > for Page Menu
Thousands across the world are following La Vagabonde’s current voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in Winter. Even experienced sailors who don’t normally get excited about a Transat are following it keenly and debating the weather routing strategy and the safety risks etc. La Vagabonde has experienced very rough weather for the first half of the crossing, including narrowly avoiding tropical storm Sebastien – which is now on its way to me in the UK. However, both La Vagabonde and her crew are strong and able and appear to have held up well against the challenging conditions.
There are three very interesting parties in the crew of 5.5 (including baby Lenny). There’s Greta Thunberg, of course, and her father Svante. The rest of the crew include the world’s most popular sailing vloggers, Aussies Riley, the skipper, and partner Elayna who sail and live on the yacht with their son Lenny. Last but not least a young English record-breaking professional yachtswoman – Nikki Henderson, also stepped up for the challenge. All three parties have achieved a huge amount at quite a young age and are acknowledged leaders in their respective fields – so it’s a fascinating impromptu team that formed a few weeks ago. Greta certainly knows how to find good talent – the mark of a great leader.
Lots of sailors and landlubbers are following the La Vagabonde tracker which basically gives the current position and track with very little extra information. Folks online have been asking “how far left to go?” and sailors have been trying to get glimpses into the performance of the boat during the crossing etc. Also a few have asked if anyone is recording the GPS data for the whole voyage because it would be interesting to “play-back” later.
So, in homage to Greta, who is a self-confessed data-junkie and science-geek, I’ve analysed the raw satellite GPS data with some nifty great-circle spherical trigonometry calculations to create a detailed log of the whole voyage.
The app has three pages of detailed information, selections and changes you make on one page will filter through to the other two pages.
Page 1: A detailed hourly log of the entire voyage. You can scroll up and down and click on dates or hours.
Page 2: A Dashboard with some interesting analysis and stats. Lots of daily averages and trends and most importantly a constantly updated estimate of the time of arrival in Europe – presumably Lisbon, Portugal.
Page 3: My home-made map route tracker showing much more information than the official tracker. Hover the mouse over the track bubbles to see the pop-up data.
Tips on moving around the app:
The app is very interactive – clicking on one part will automatically change all of the other displays and pages. Try clicking on dates, hours, parts of the graphs or the tables etc. Click on the table column headings to sort the tables in any order.
There is a lot of information, so depending on your device’s screen size, it might be hard to read. So, each table and graph have a “focus mode” (in the top right) to temporarily enlarge that section. On the bottom bar of each page, I’ve also added a full screen mode.
Here is is the direct link to the app. Power BI direct link It bypasses this blog and goes direct to my Power BI service which is run in Microsoft’s datacentres – so it’s a faster connection and also the data updates around 1 hour sooner. This direct link can also be better optimised for viewing on a phone – I’ll modify the app to do this in the next few hours.
I hope that, like me, you enjoy using this app to track Greta and La Vagabonde’s progress.
Fantastic document of an historik event many people in the future would love to have this.
Thank you.
Your Power BI Direct Link needs updating – the URL is no longer valid
Thank you very much – I missed that when I made some changes
Brilliant work. Thanks for doing it!
Hi Ian,
It was a bit of fun. 99% of the data on the reports was derived (automatically) from just the GPS lat/long co-ordinates and the time stamp – as obviously we don’t have access to the boat’s sophisticated sailing and nav instruments. It’s amazing how much insight can be squeezed out of the most minimal of data with a bit of maths. Something I didn’t think about is that, over the last 2 days, there are now people in over 60 countries looking at this – i.e. effectively 24×7. Nearly all of it is automated except a couple of steps that would be too much effort to automate, given that the app has only 6 more days of usefulness. So, do I get no sleep for the next 6 days to do hourly refreshes or which region of the world do I make wait for updates for 7 hours whilst I sleep? It’s still good fun though and a tiny bit of support for a good cause.
Thanks
Andy
Thank you for doing this!.
this might just be speculative: but from cross referencing the position of the boat to positions of TS sebastian at the weekend, La vagabond is 6 hours ahead of this data?.
Do you mean that my latest position data is 6 hours old or that I am showing the boat’s position in the wrong place – out by hours 6. I don’t quite understand what you mean by “La vagabond is 6 hours ahead of this data?” or what the connection is to TS Sebastien. Could you give an example of the data please so that I can investigate? Thanks.
it was more of a rookie question! + before I came across your site and wondered whether you had noticed any anomalies. I was looking at the Predictwind tracker on Lavagabondes website (that correlates with the data you use) and compared it to meteological maps and sites like Windy.com. The eye of TS sebastien moved NE fairly quickly so I took a rough series of time stamps+ positions and compared them to the position of the boat on the predictwind tracker… thus the speculation the boat was 6 hours ahead of its published position. (and frankly for la vagabonde, a logical thing to do).
It wasn’t scientific, more a displacement activity from all other news!.
I see. So that would mean that when Predictwind (and my data) shows La Vagabonde at X,Y lat/log co-ordinates at say 13:30UTC, they were actually at that position 6 hours earlier at 07:30UTC. I wouldn’t think that they would do that. But anything is possible. Not easy to check mid-atlantic as we have few reference points. But we could check the media reports to try to find the exact time of departure from Hampton and compare that back to the lat/long and timestamps on the first few hourly records on page 1 of my app.
Ha, thank you for your patience. The US media reports available put the departure time from hampton shortly before 8am (virginia time) which tallies with your time stamps.
I live in london, sailing is unfamiliar territory; sailing across the north atlantic in the middle of winter on a catamaran… no idea what that entails… just interested and curious to understand more.
If Greta Thunberg hadn’t got on that boat 2 weeks ago, I wouldn’t be asking you rookie questions.
its down??
I don’t think so. It’s working for me. The site stats show that it has been up all day with around 20 to 30 visitors online at any one time. There is plenty of bandwidth so it shouldn’t be slow. Can you try again? Let me know if you still can’t access it.
Thanks Andy for this wonderful data organization and presentation.
I was wondering why they are sailing to Lisbon and not someplace further north like Porta etc. This would be less distance to finish the ocean portion and put them closer to Madrid once they reach land which logistically makes it easier for Greta and her father to use electric cars or similar mode of transport. I am sure that she would prefer to continue her trip as fossil free as possible and therefore all electric cars would be the answer. Any thoughts on this? I know you can’t speak for their planning process but just curious if you had any ideas? Thanks Ken
Wow, Andy, this is amazing! Thank you for taking the time to put this together for us all to enjoy!
Little girl welcome home you are welcome