Who Gains?

It's easy to lead with the results from the weekend, but instead I'd like to lead with the work during the week that went into enabling those results. We had a great week of practice. Early in the week with mostly upper class boats we got a ton of work done on starting (Kate was in the coach boat with me that day), and we kept the heat on starting all week. Tons of tacking and gybing practice, as well as mark roundings, and a bunch of sail trim stuff. 

This all resulted in a situation on the river where, for example, even though I was standing on Harvard's dock, I could easily make out a top mark rounding that Caitlin and Luke did just by their technique. It was way better than the boats around and they gained on the boats ahead and stretched on the boats behind. The women's tacks and gybes, relative to the fleets they sailed in, were at a consistently high level, by which I mean some boats sometimes tacked and gybed as well as us at times, but we hit that level more consistently than other teams. 

Good work pays off. There is a great saying "an amateur practices until s/he can do it right, but a pro practices until s/he can't do it wrong." I'd like for us to get to the point where we outgrow the ability to do it wrong. Lots more work, but we should all be excited to see the sign posts of progress. 

Today's post focuses on relative gains in headers and lifts. If two boats are sailing along, one of them gains in some situations and the other gains in other situations. The most common ones follow as diagrams.

In situation 1, we have Boat L (leeward boat) and Boat W (windward boat). They are even with each other, L being an equal amount forward on W as W is above L. 

If we get a header in this situation, the boats will rotate clockwise (since they are sailing on starboard), and as you can easily see, Boat L makes a gain in this situation. 

Conversely, if they get lifted, Boat W makes a gain.

Simple enough, right?

Then we go to a situation in which one boat is directly behind the other, as shown by Boats A (Ahead) and Boat B (Behind). This is a situation you would often see exiting a leeward mark or potentially at other points during the race. 

So let's give these boats a header and see what happens:

Boat A clearly gains in the header, right? Now lets go back and give them a lift instead.

What I'd like you to do for now is to internalize these scenarios and how they play out, so that you instinctively know how a wind shift is going to affect you relative to the boats around you. Good, effective, fast decision making depends on pattern recognition. These are simple patterns, and they need to become hardwired into your brain. Think about them, flip them over in your mind, ask the coaches about how these work, but eventually they need to become part of your hard drive. 

PBO Week

Today's title will mean nothing to most of you since you weren't there, but it will be how I remember this week most easily so that's what this post is called. This is more of a notes post for myself. Things will get more fleshed out in later posts but these notes will help me remember the week and keep thoughts alive.

We've made a lot of mechanics progress this last week and I feel like some strategic/tactics progress too.

Having seen us in a regatta, starts are a limiter (read about limiters here and in the post before it). Line sighting, downspeed boat handling, boat control, these are all issues.

I wonder about the psychology of the team in practice vs at regattas. From the results I've seen (and results aren't the whole story), the team's results this weekend weren't what I'd have expected. Quite simply, though I don't place judgmental expectations on the team, if I'd been asked to guess what our results would havei been this weekend I'd say most of our events would have wound up around 5th or maybe a bit better or worse. We did that well in only one event. That was surprising. Either my impressions of how well the team is sailing in practice is skewed in some way, or the level of competition is quite a bit higher than expectations, or our team underperformed relative to our sailing level in practices. I'd guess a lot of it is the latter but I don't know. Some of it will just take time to learn. We'll look into that.

Aidan and Lauren did a luff duck in one race today and it made my week. They passed at least 2 boats because of it, I was ecstatic to see them whip the move out, in an appropriate situation, and then execute it well, and then have it pay off big. That was really really cool.

I think we might need to introduce a bit more competition into practices. I think our practices are productive and instructive and well run and they have a ton to recommend them, but I wonder whether we're missing out on competitive situations. Tough saying.

PBO was a really pretty event.

FJ tacks and gybes

9/5 practice notes:
Yesterday was a productive day. Being productive is fairly easy in perfect conditions, and we managed to nail that. Hooray us.

Most skippers way oversteer into the FJ tacks in flat water. The boat loses almost no momentum as you turn into the tack in flat water so you don't have to steer fast. Steering into the tack more gently gains windward distance relative to a quicker tack, and allows a good roll and fast exit from the tack.

There is NO preroll in an FJ tack, except in very light air if you are trying to cheat. So there is no preroll in an FJ tack. The skipper's body movement is to slide your butt aft enough to point both knees forward as you turn the boat into the wind, and then give a good solid upper body roll as the jib backs (most were doing this roll way too early yesterday - the best FJ crews will nearly universally say that in light and medium air the roll happens as the jib backs enough to hit the mast, which is way later than most of you are used to rolling), and then cross and flatten.

Crews need to work on footwork in the tacks, as a lot of people got hung up in the straps. It is no crime to look at your feet during every tack for a day to learn what they are doing and how they are interacting with the boat. Your tacks won't be the best during this process but we are investing in learning here. You will be better after this process.

In a proper light/medium wind to wing FJ gybe, the hardest part is not spinning out to windward on the new gybe. If everything is done right in the first steps, it's going to be easy to spin out. But if you manage to avoid spinning out, your gybes will be awesome.

Step 1 is "we're gybing." The crew takes the jib sheet from the skipper and KEEPS THE JIB FLYING. #1 mistake yesterday was everyone just dropped the jib in the beginning of the gybe. That's slow. Board goes some of the way down. Less in an FJ than in a 420, more on this in a later post.

Step 2 is a very very (very) small steer into the gybe, while the crew shifts weight to windward and the full jib helps steer the boat down. Windward heel and a full jib make steering almost unnecessary. The boom is flipped over and the skipper crosses and immediately goes to a pretty aggressive "weight out" position as you turn the boat fairly hard downwind. THIS IS THE MOST RUDDER MOVEMENT OF THE GYBE but it's still not huge. The crew also helps to get the boat heeling to windward as soon as the boom switches sides. You have to get used to the feeling that you are going to spin down into a death roll - that is the correct feeling, you just don't actually do the death roll part.

As the boat is turning down, the crew is already gybing the jib with a very hard pull of the sheet through the block, after which the skipper takes the sheet to wing the jib, board goes back up, and you are off and running.

Other notes:
Most people have too much vang most of the time. Your vang should be slack in pre-start, unless you have an excellent reason otherwise. If you head down with the vang on, you accelerate. Most of the time you are heading down in pre-start, you are trying to pivot to protect your hole. Accelerating screws that up completely.

There is a reason that I will encourage you to sail backward every day. It is not just for show. Boat control on the starting line is VERY IMPORTANT, being able to back the boat is a big part of that but also one of the most effective start line boat position moves is being able to head the boat down from nearly head to wind to close hauled by simply pushing your boom out hard once, quickly. It's a tough move to master, almost no people truly get it (I had it nailed for about 3 years and now don't practice anywhere close to enough so I stink at it), and sailing backward is THE key step in learning it.