John,

I think the garmin wrist unit is around 125.00 and does vmg, location, speed, compass so your argument about cost does not hold up very well. A tactic is around 400.00 and just does compass and timer. It would just be to hard to set up a good system on a beach cat that gave you an advantage over another team with setting the line and marks and trying to read it and change settings while racing. A lot of teams have used vmg for distance races only to find out they should have gone to shore and not followed the rhumb line. One thing about sailing is the conditions are never the same and no electronic device is going to make you better than someone else on beach cats because of the loss of attention to boat handling playing with the device. They are fun to play with though.