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.