Youth Programme and What Is Progress and How?

Youth programme is just around the corner now, given there will swimming this month and one or two rules meetings in april/may.

What can I tell them about progress? How do they themselves expect to progress and what presumptions or false impressions do they have?

I hope to split them in two and take the more committed crowd myself, sitting them down in their pairs and asking about their expectations and what they feel they are weak in or want to move into now.

I would quite happily combine wednesdays with actual training but that can wait a year. It would free up tueday nights for new users which would be good, or one-on-one sessions out in the fjord.

Now they need to learn the rules and spatial visualisation combined with rational cool headed ness is not always their best point, but on paper at least they knew it.

What summary of learn-ed wisdom can I give to them as a group though?

I think I will tell them that there are no great tricks to the sport; there aren't so many clever little tweaks, tactics or methods which give them progress. Yes boat tuning and yes using the rules tactically win places, but to be good you have to master the basics and go on remastering them!

That's why I will try to press home how important it is to sail the boat flat as soon as there is enough wind. Why swapping hands is so important coming through the tack or gybe. Why trim is important.

Through all this why finesse with sheets , tiller and body movements is worth building up for each smaller operation and then in moving from one to the next.

The basics are so important: this year I will come back very firmly to actually sailing slowly! stopping when and where you precisely need to. Something a lot of yachties are pretty bad at as soon as the motor is off. The adrenalin is flowing and they don't want to lose boat speed before the start or at a mark, but they end up needing to fall off and lose position and places! Bumper cars at starts is not good at interclub regattas.

Also I will help deconstruct my own sailing: a key area of weakness for me in HPS boats, and new beginners in any dinghy, is the harden up. Bearing away - hoist is sloppy but effective for the kids, and can be polished. But hardening up is actually a subtler skill where more places can be won or secured.

I think I was pretty lucky to have gone through the very long standing RYA levels 2-4 in the 1990s and 2000, especially with instructors who themselves had been trained by old timers who had sailed things like GP14s, moths and finns no doubt.

I always remember, and like to even if it was in a patronising tone, cheif instructor Derrick saying that we should be able to use just a couple of fingers in the extension grip even in 12 knts of wind: then we were sailing light and fast and in control with the boat set up right. I think this is such a little core of the onion which the outerlayers can be built on: the whole pictrue being coordination of intention, tiller, body movement and sheeting to sail with finesse.

Now you could do this all with feel on the fingers and no knowledge whatso ever of aerodynamics : you would acheive the end of maintaining attached flow when you need to, and conversely, shaking it off at the right time in a tack or gybe, or stall for position.

The five points of sailing are pretty good and I think the older kids are worth introducing to this as a constant-check-list-cycle. I mean we often forget it in keel boats for minutes, sometimes hours on an offshore and we leave something wrong.

The five points though is a discipline to beat yourself with and may stick your head too much in the boat as a new beginner. I mean that I have seen some quite inexperienced sailors either have a degree of tactical genius , in an idiot savant way ( under the forth bridges!, go there where there is less current and the big boats cannot follow! ) and also born helmsmen who can go fast on one tack but can't do tactics at the same time or really know what goes wrong in tacks/gybes. SO getting your head out of the boat should be an earlier skill to learn in racing than being able to run continuous improvement programmes in your head!


Probably the biggest mistake the group makes at the moment is the same one that most beginners at any age make once they can actually sail a bit. Also I notice that perpetual loser-boats never shake this fault. It is spatial awareness of which tack is going to pay and where the wind may come from or clean air appear.

On Sailing Anarchy and in text books there is quite a lot of time taken to explain why boats in an oscillating wind can be fooled into sailing on the wrong side of the course/tack because they get all worked up about the lifts they are getting, when the shortest side of the diamond is on the other tack! For someone who can get their head out the boat this can be a winning tactic, even after a mediocre start.

For those days with an even wind which oscillates in speed more than meaningful direction for headers/lifts, then a spatial awareness of tacking up a 60' cone using rule-of-thumb : " we are in wind, it looks light ahead, there is wind on the other tack and we are getting to the 60' (30:30) line over our front shoulder: we tack! We go up the cone until the bouy is over our back shoulder finally in this light stuff.

I mean this stuff sounds simple and even trite, but this is what makes the sailor, not using a laptop or a tack-tic.

Within about 4 years of me starting racing I could spot race winning moves in light airs, when it it can be really hard to win. In medium airs I've never been very good at calling and sailed on too many HC boats at the time I would have gleamed most visual-spatial out of it.

I still use the finger grip , even in keel boats in light airs. I still use the front-shoulder back shoulder rule of thumb for marks and obstructions.

Why am I a light airs expert? I guess you have to sail in them in all the venues I am used to more than average. I have spent a lot more time sub 6 than plus 22. I think also the actual boredom and frustration drove me to learn more and think on the water, while dinghy sailing I just always knew how important it was to ghost out to the more open water or back home! So you have a little time and yes there are tricks on top of just finesse which mean you can take places and wins.

In medium, well to be blushingly honest, most of the boats I have sailed on have been crap at going up the course to gather "stats" and then looking for anything which would affect the wind. So with poor teachers you only learn as much as they know.

This is also my arguement against HC racing, much though I have had fun doing it: you sail too much in your own wind and are not forced enough to look at the stats. You can concentrate on boat speed and clean air rather than the "out of boat" reckonings which make for true mastery.

So then , back to basics for the yout' of the town? Abso&%#¤ing lutely