A simulation doesn’t necessarily need to be remotely physically accurate to be useful, as long as the simulated behaviour is qualitatively similar to the real thing. For sailing a small boat, I’d imagine the important things would be the shape of the sail and the heel of the boat for a given apparent wind, presented to whatever sensors your sailbot is using. For the water’s surface, random semi-regular perturbation (sum of sine waves) would be fine, and something similar (or maybe a random walk) for wind direction and strength.
For this kind of real-world robotics, you can’t optimise in any academic sense so you just have to go for effective and robust.
For this kind of real-world robotics, you can’t optimise in any academic sense so you just have to go for effective and robust.