Starts III.....When Starts "Go Bad"...Breaking Good....

I think i have touched on a few of the things to avoid and mentioned that starts are my personal stress zone in sailing, being a bug bear I have to work on to eliminate. It just isnt like riding a bike for me. I get on and fall over as often as it glide out!

Starts can go ever so badly because you put yourself in the wrong place, but also because of in-fortuity or finally because of brash rule breaking on someone else's behalf which either immediately affects you, or has a chain reaction along the start line to you.

Here I will try to think back to bad starts and how to avoid them, rather than the text book fixes ( which are- to tack right onto port immediately; to reach in as fast as you can and punch up towards the fleet if you are late or bumped out your lane; to follow a bigger boat out on their transom if the same happens to you)

The Squeeze at the IDM  Committe Boat End

Here you are up at the IDM, looking good when boats start to luff up towards head to wind, or the tide moves them right or alternatively a boat crashes in immediately to either your leeward or windward. As you move towards the line, various jostling results and if you are a little behind then someone may neglect to see you , or pretend not to have seen you and luff-duck onto your line making it impossible to sail over them and hard not to collide with them.

An alternative is that you have a good lane, but people are a little early or are chicken and start to squeeze up: you risk hitting rigs and your hull and eventually losing your lane off the start line as above.

There are a few things to do here as you get squeezed up: firstly if you are entering a lane with space originally in front of you, but a boat is luffing into it, then you have to really consider bailing out: you either rag sails or you luff up. The latter is a lot more aggressive and risky - it is pretty much bumper cars in some fleets to do this. The mistake can get worse If you leave the lane ahead open:  then boats from either side in an HC fleet can drop or luff hard into it:

Prevention is better than cure: It is best to adopt an OD way of doing things and get into that hole, on your lane, and up on the bow with the next man. Then you have rule 14 on your side at least for boats luffing you and physically you command that space. If you are early, so is everyone around you. If you know you are early then you can become a little controller and luff the guys up, maybe causing chaos further up but that is the game and people with their nose in at the sharp end right on the IDM have to expect getting it bloodied.

An alternative in light boats and not a lot of wind is to literally back out of the situation: back the sails with the rudder centered and then swing the boat out of the lane and reach off to the next lane. Remember that the rudder will work in reverse, the tiller direction being the swing direction, and that the boat may pivot a little differently in reverse and the sail balance may be different.  I have done this in dinghies a few times and in sports boats a couple of times. Remember to only do it if you know you will not collide with late starters reaching in along the transoms of the fleet.

The other bail out alternative is to just rag the sails early and communicate to the guy to windward that you will come upright and they should sail forward while you avoid collision with them. If you are up at the biased end of the line, you now will have some space to reach off into as per our "being on the transom of the windward boat, booking a lane" . ..in this case, someone else filled the hole ahead and you are going to have to start late in someone's wake. You can of course then choose to tack early onto port but really you want to just plod out and see your boat speed and angle before you risk having to double tack to clear the IDM and Committee boat or other late starters on STB.

Burial in an HC Fleet

Well this happens to the best of us: it means that we have a start when a significant number of faster boats roll onto your wind and you sit about a quarter to half a knot down on your desired boat speed. If you are a long way down the line, then lifts don't help you as the boats on top of you get them too, and tacking on a header is likely to get boats on top of you as they too spot the header.

As slowest or slow end of boats in your HC fleet, you should try then to start as I say, more on the committee boat end because by sheer simple arithmetic, you have fewer boats on your wind and you need to duck fewer boats if you choose to go over to port. Alternatively with a pin end bias, you want to sit on that and let faster boats roll you , or take a double quick tack up into a new lane if there is one, behind a crowd of faster boats.

Being mid line or at the pin end is a bad place when you are the slowest boat in an HC fleet because you risk always being in bad air and never sailing to your HC "time" as they call it. It is the exact reverse of a good mid line start in an OD where your start amplifies your relative boat speed on the fleet as you achieve clean air on the line at speed. Here you loose it, quite likely with 15 seconds to go to the gun!

Another way around  this as a small boat in HC is to have a darn good transit or a very good GPS and know the line better than the mid line sag, which is often very pronounced like a Vee on HC starts. Then you can both get an ideal boat speed start for your smaller vessel, and port tack sections of the fleet if you risk being rolled or if the RHS looks best.


On Arithmetic:

Like I said above, starting right with no huge bias to the pin end as a given, pays in sailing due to the two first rules 10 and 11. By the simple arithmetic that if you do get in a bad position then you have fewer boats to mess with in order to get out of it: ie into clean wind.

If you are down the fleet or on the pin end bias flyer, and going to get rolled by faster boats, then you also have to do a bit of quick arithmetic and geometry of the local boats around you. Who will roll you? Who is going to sit on your wind for the whole beat ( ie got a better start, to windward, but hardly any faster than you) and who do you stand a chance of keeping your bow out in front of. After 5 to ten boat legnths of the line, you will see who is on the pace and who is tacking off to restart or to go right. You will see also in an HC fleet, who is sailing slow and low and who as I say, will sail forward and out of your wind within a reasonable time. You  will loose out by doing a double tack to maintain your general preferred side of the course while clearing your wind, so you have to equate when you will get clear wind if you hold on, and how good it will be to get up to a new lane. Also if you have been wise and watched the gust and shift pattern before the start on your test beat, you may be able to pare-empt a header by going over to port early, or you may go over in a lull period tacking back to starboard for the double effect apparent wind lift in the next gust ( in the northern hemisphere).

Remember What Time You Have to Sail To in Handicap

What we have talked about above is all dammage limitations and sounds a bit resided to second best. Doing the sums and maybe sitting a little longer in bad wind may seem like a losing strategy: but back up here, this is HC racing we are talking about!

What is important to realise is that performance collated handicap systems like CYCA and Portsmouth Yardstick rate a boat type on previous AVERAGE performance as a national or international fleet of that type ( given you don't have a one off or strange import) . So that relates to what the average sailors do with them, and what the average weight carried on board is.  Still in your favour in many a cruiser-racer  HC fleet:  measurement rules do the opposite - they give a standard handicap to a boat which will be sailed in different skill levels and with different total all up weights to different boat speeds and different results to the theoretical, giving in effect an actual average time per course nautical mile. A kind of hidden performance handicap which you can learn by looking at results and elapsed time. Some IRC handicaps can never actually be sailed "to" because the boat does not go relatively as fast as the handicap penalises it for, while others have an average on the water result and timing which you can learn.

Here comes in then "know your enemy". which i consider a top 5 of racing strategy as applied to tactical situations on the day!  If you prepare your boat better than an average boat, or keep it lighter or have a better rig and trim for the day, then you are in effect sailing above your handicap rating. Couple this to what relative speed and what HC the boats which are on your wind or likely to come onto your wind are at, then you can see that sitting in some degree of bad wind while they sail over you may be more painful to them "in front" because they have you following them and they may not be escaping you as fast as their HC rating should dictate.

Conversely, any slower rated boats sitting on your breeze are for one, beating you and secondly, likely not to sail away forward of you and free up your wind. Then you really have to tack away and consider your tactics and race course strategy to get ahead of them.

On Geometry : Straight "up" the Middle

Another general observation on HC fleets is that they tend to be a bit bipolar no matter the conditions. The fleet tends to split into the early port tackers going RHS and the stay-on starboards, going left. By half way up the beat this can be remarkable and it is partly a sheep flock behaviour- you see the guys around you either carrying on, because they are pinned in a little and think they may as well try left, or you see "everyone" going right and you don't want to miss out on what they are getting.

Remember also that just because one end of the start line is more upwind than the other, the whole course may have a different bias W-L line, or the shift pattern on the first beat may annullerate the line's windward bias advantage for those whom get on the wrong side of it, out by the lay line.

Given that you have started somewhere off the right hand end, or mid line in effect or are getting sailed over horrendously out on the pin end, then you have an alternative to the bipolar fleet: you can tack up the middle.

This means in effect that you double tack firstly to clear your air. Now on a new lane, back on starboard you can begin to see the fleet more and do some bearings on the weather mark, and check the wind pattern a little. Since you have opted for clean air, you can now tack on an obvious oscillation which will be a 5 degree wind shift before it actually reaches that five point peak. Also you can see the wind on the water more and choose to tack before gusts or hold on to them on STB. (northern hemisphere! )

Using a 60' degree cone to tack up is then your first hand rail for getting up the middle of the bet. Second to this you can then play tactics because at some point the left hand half of the fleet have to come over to the right if it is port roundings, or on the rare day they give you starboard roundings then you can come into the layline on starboard when you choose from within the 60' cone.  So you are going to meet other boats: those who are slower but were ahead of you, you now want to force to be behind you by ducking you or sitting in your bad wind. You can also worry bigger boats by sailing STB towards them - bigger boats tend to take longer to tack. Further to these two points on either faster, slower or same speed boats you can match race boats who are poorer at tacking than you up the beat.

Another point on why some sailors follow the  60' cone rather slavishly, given no clear tidal or wind bend advantage in one side alone, is that if there is a big shift or weather change, then you are not amplifying it as you would if you are nearer to the layline at the 90' cone. Due to the course geometry, if you sail out too far towards a lay line before half way up the course in particular, then your losses are made a lot worse than sailing up the middle. While on the middle, you also have the chance to get to the right side quicker and you start to get benefit as soon as you tack by annulerating your mistake quicker. You can think of the winds' centre line relative to the course as a pendulum and if you sail nearer its centre then you risk less and can follow it out to a preferred side rather than being stuck way out on the wrong side.

Finally like I mention above, sailing up the middle means that you can use the shifts and spend time working out if the bearing to the lee mark is DDW or if there is a course bias which may differ from the line bias. Thus you can sail a good off wind leg and go up the correct, biased side on the second beat, armed also with some knowledge of the shift pattern you gained while sailing in your own wind up the middle of the first beat.

I took over the helm of an acquaintances classic meter racer for the national championships of 32 boats. The boat was dog slow, it turned out to have a bit of a mussel farm on the bottom of the keel and a mediocre trim to the rig rake. We did badly. The fleet usually split completely right or left within about 10 boat lengths of the start. I chose to sod that and tack up a rough cone to the mark and that was the only top half of fleet result we got! We also tacked on a couple of small headers and up towards wind, and at one point it looked like we could be up in the top 5 boats. The boat speed though was so poor that we fell back on the approach as they came in on the lay lines, but we did an ok run and repeated the same on the next beat to hold a 14th out of 32.


On Course Side

OCS is no bad thing: if you are out on a wednesday night round the cans then you have learned something. At a nationals or major series, then you have maybe a discard, while on an offshore, you have to go back but you have so long to sail that you can make up for a couple of minutes.

OCS is something I am terrified of for no good reason: it is just a learning curve and you learn what it all looks like and feels like to be just over.

Without a scoring penalty in place, then you have to go back and given your bow man has seen the error and the flag, then you need to do it especially on an offshore.

All I can say is look out for Flag I, round the ends and if you are in a lane, be prepared to stop the boat in order to make the shortest and quickest dip back to the line if no I is up. Often boats start to fall off and find them selves almost colliding with boats on other lanes or broaching up or the like: if you are in tight company, make sure you have enough to windward to allow your rig to come upright and then slip out the sails, move the bow low of the wind once the boat to leeward is out the way,  look back 180' around and trim on the jib first as you fall off: Gybe round and go up right as you can to dip the line completely and restart- preferably on port if there is no bias on the course, or a right hand bias as per notes above on the fleet arithmetic. Stopping, Falling off, gybing round and then starting on port is the quickest way as it avoids sailing too far forward or to the left, or double tacking to get over the line on STB when you probably have no need at this point ( beware the next fleet sighting the line though, fellow OCS and late starters


The Late, Late Breakfast Show

Late breakfast? Technical issues? There are two types of sailors, those who have been 2 minutes or more late for a start, and those who are going to be 2 minutes or more late for a start.

Late starts can be recovered from, but only in an HC fleet when the wind is either light or heavy. In medium airs starting so far back means that you never will make up the time.

In light and heavy airs you will most likely be starting both in your own wind and at maximum possible boat speed as you hit the line. In front of you, the whole fleet shows you where to not go and you can get up to the arithmetic right hand side for normal port roundings when ever the wind shift or gusts help you to get there. Also you may have more time and "head out the boat" to spot a tidal anomaly or a change in the tide, or a new weather marker showing that a massive bias may come over the course.

In both airs, a well prepared racing boat can slice its way through a heavier, cruiser based fleet: Smallest in fleet may be so competitive when sailed to max boat speed in its own wind that even following the fleet pays, and the largest in class boat may be able to swan through the fleet unburdoned by a crowded start and initial tactics. In a more racing oriented HC fleet, you may find that many ahead of you are way over canvassed and heeling so much that their keels are slipping grip so you may be better prepared, or you can see that the wind ahead is worth reefing and stripping down for, perhaps in the time you are still sailing up to the start as it goes off.

In light airs you really do see where the wind is ahead of you, and as you can focus on sailing out of wind shadow to get to the next block of breeze. In light airs against heavy cruisers, 2 minutes will soon evapourate. In a more racer fleet, then you can learn from other peoples mistakes and sail around the holes on the course. Also you may be able to hold both clear air and your tack distance much longer, thus not losing so much as other boats forced to tack away tactically or to get into wind.