Teaching and Unlearning

The skills I like to teach are still a little lost on experienced regatta warriors.

I like to avoid teaching a lot of sailing jargon to begin with and try to teach starting and stopping, and then hardening up and bearing away.  Tacking the kids often here have seen on their parent's boat so round they go or I have a helper or shoot out to the end of the reaching/tight reaching course and cast the bow round for the newbies. Learning to start and stop is crucial.

However many experienced racing sailors seem to have lost the art of sailing slowly.

Sailing slowly and stopping or just braking is very important. This weekend the helm did some of his usual stressing about the place- reaching into the 6 boat legnth long start line on port (there was shore and other hard stuff on the RHS with just enough room for two boats to line up to fight for the IDM) . Then also at the leeward mark, he reminded more of some sailors who really on average are much poorer than said helm.

Helm him, he hath bad planning. And high expectation, and of course an asymmetric with willing crew to boot which can be whipped round and used in general to shoot around the area before the leeward mark.

Even high performance dinghies and skiffs can be made to run deep towards the mark allowing for firstly, a clean take down , mexican or not, and then also the second purpose- defending a place on the three boats rule probably waiting for a final gybe over to STB or being .

At the weekend oh no, three gybes within 30 meters DDW actual distance to the mark in a harbour only about 7 boat legnths across. Also of course a melges has its own tack line seperate form all else and controllable, so you can slip it out in the last 50 m or so, and run deep. The losses in the gybes are probably five times more than the loss of boat speed in going deep and slipping it out a meter.

We were lucky to some extent then to not have many chances to practice the opposite where you are following boat and you need to brake to hold your place,and avoid going wide on the leeward mark. I did however do this just the once, centering the main, but got scolded for my efforts and thought better of it.

As I will blogg on again about spinnakers themselves, the worst thing about difficult stuff in sailing is not the equipment or the grade of difficulty, but it is rather the poor attitude of the helmsman!