Should we all be looking for marginal gains? Or is the average racing sailor clutching at straws when looking to make a series of small often unrelated improvements which some may say are just a case of diminishing returns ? So in other words - When does the learning curve become an exercise in diminishing returns, with only marginal gains to be had from minutae of tweaking?
I think we even have to step back a little here and think about what a sailing and racing learning curve is composed of and how it may appear:
What are the building blocks of our learning, and should we look to polish these all the time, each in their own case, or to deconstruct them and reassemble as a whole?
What shape is the learning curve in sailing from junior oppi sailor to being Knighted Sir Ben Ainslee??
How is your own learning curve_?
Marginal Gains vs Diminishing Returns vs Clutching at Straws at the Impass
Well there is an odd little dilema there some sailors seem to have. They think that they are at a stage of 'marginal gains' and run around the boat tweaking things, and getting the crew to do small, sometimes odd changes to how things are trimmed and so on. A key characteristic of this type of often frustrated sailor, is that they most often resort to spending money on bits and pieces aka ' go faster gadgets'.
Yes sailors with top results are in the realms of looking for small tweaks to get that extra tenth of a knot or half a boat legnth on a rounding or a quarter of a bow on the start line, but many mediocre sailors seem to hit a wall and give up on advancing their own skills or the crew dynamic and instead, tweak like hell, and often end up selling up and buying a handicap boat with supposedly a 'bandit rating'. They have missed something in their entire outlook or some major part of their learning curve.
Steep, Abrupt Steps on the Learning Curve
To my mind the learning curve has some steep sections followed by practicing at that level for a while, before you move on to learn something new, and in doing so move onto another steep section. In fact you could say that there are some parallel learning curves for different skill sets, which have to really run parallel and in the right sequence at each stage in order for you to master that little steep bit of the overall curve of performance and ability.
These are what I can summate as >
1) boat preparation and rigging,
2) sail set-boat-balance-trim-course-steering ( the classic six of learning to sail and remembering to check under way)
3) the key four key manoevres- luffing, bearing away, tacking and gybing
4) tactics & rules,
5) wind and tide strategy
6) .......and also you can choose to take as either its own entity or as something which goes across all these :team work and the dynamics of the team.
Each block outlined above has of course dozens of sub components. However it can be difficult for the eager new sailor or developer racer to see the 'wood for the trees' if they consider their abilities, problems and challenges at a lower level and start focusing on getting really clued up on a very small detail, or on a detail which on its own will not create the synergy they were looking for as part of the whole picture of 1 to 6 above.
To exemplify: take the case of a sailor who reads a lot about sail making theory and technology, and spends time, effort and money with a sailmaker in getting new sails made for the boat. However within this 'block' there is also rigging, and of course it relates to trimming the sails which in turn relates to team work. The gain may have been greater in learning if the existing sails were being utilised with correct rig settings, and the trimming was matched correspondingly and then the crew work around say tacks or sail changes was made better.
Passing Go to Move On
In the early stages of your learning curve then, you must really focus in each and all of these key areas in order to be able to progress in terms of ability and performance in racing. Later on as you start to be more competent at all of these, then you may want to look at singeling out one particular area for a focused improvement, and eventually as an expert sailor you will be looking for marginal gains - small ways to improve which are either summative or even synergistic as a combination of small incremental improvements across several areas.
Take at the early stage of sailing my first boat which was a TASAR, and my under estimation of the importance of rig set up. The boat when carrying an optimal crew weight, has a design wind of 9 knts. This means it is fully powered up, and in more wind you will be depowering by flattening the sails after this wind. I went out one day with a new crew in and get loaded up very suddenly, as I found out sailing her in force 6 gusting 7 one day which is up to 35 knts! For the boat in that wind we were seven times over design wind, and I had not set the rig up for any major depowering and did not really bother to flatten the main much on the kicker/cunningham and outhaul. I could sail the boat competently if not competitively in light to medium winds, but made an idiot of myself with a new crew by not thinking rig tune was important as the wind built through the morning.
To say it another way, you cannot make up for very much if any of a gap in your necessary combined set of learning steps in these different skill and knowledge areas by using small tweaks here and there...............If you are missing or lacking skills in just one building block, then this becomes the weakest link in your sail-game!
Further up the learning curve, it may be one of these areas which requires special focus in order for you to enjoy a good increment in performance. Take my own example :
My Own Next Steep Bit
My own next step is actually to really start to master wind and tide strategy, which is something perhaps I should have learned more on in sailing school way back when in fact, just at a lower level. You learn a bit underway of course- at sailing school on longer 'tours' you learn that one tack is favoured for getting round a headland > if you race on wednesday nights in a prevailing wind direction and there is a wind bend feature, you learn quite quickly that the side it is on pays, and that boats go over for it in a decided 'motorway' route once they are up the course a bit. But some things are not so easy to gather or to use much intuition with. For example the tide-wind vectors which are quite complex to understand and although I have read a good many examples in books, I struggle to visualise or be able to calculate them for a given sailing area ,time point and course.
Also with wind shifts, apart from the gusts here in the northern hemisphere invariably being veered and thus favouring starboard tack, but only on an otherwise unbiased or right biased course!! I do not really spot any given interval or rythm in other shifts and minor variations in wind stregnth. Also getting to define potential wind bends when the wind alters course big time, or I am new to a venue.
Thinking About It All- Mastery Again and the Plateau
The key elements of sailing are then a bit like building blocks, but at some points along the learning curve you have to see them as joined-up-writing and be able to practice and race at the level you are competent to. This is then the plateau stage as the proponents of training long periods without apparent gain advocate. What this means is mentally preparing yourself to not become frustrated with your current level of learning, your current technique level, your crew's ability and most of all for racers, your current level of results.
With results as a top bench mark, you should be looking for consistency and not be frustrated by say mid fleet results, or if you are a bit better then only occaisional wins with a steady top 10 result. Being aware that you are on a plain is supposed to be a joy. You can drop your shoulders and lose some of that aggression and frustration on the race course and within the crew dynamic.
Communicate to your crew that this is a time for practice and enjoying sailing at the level you are at, and just doing your best without trying to bust a gut so to speak. This "time" could be a whole season, a series over many weeks, or a championship week. You should feel that in the previous stage of the learning curve you have introduced some new knowledge and skills, and now it is the time to practice these before aquiring new skills such that we walk before we try to run.
Dropping your shoulders and just sailing as well as you can does not mean that you are stagnating. Mentally you are getting used to being calm and making often more modest and sensible decisions, while you and your crew's motor functions (motor-neurone, balance, timing and coordination in the team) are all actually improving and being increasingly 'hard wired' as in other sports. This is why the plateau is important in martial arts for example.
A bit like the belt system in Karate, ok, we are a pretty good yellow belt, we practice a while at yellow level, then we do some decisive, intense training to reach the green belt test.
Further to this not being a time of stagnation, as we sail more and more by second nature, we have more time to have the 'head out of the boat'. This in itself can improve or consolidate results over a season. Also it means that we can start to note the areas which we would like to look at at the next phase of steeper learning, once we have mastered our current level. If we choose to look at one and all of these small items in a season, then we miss the point of plateauing. We break the mechanic of programming in a basic level of required competence.
However it is clear that dropping our shoulders and being more objective IN THE BOAT is also a side effect of plateauing. So we are more likely to be able to spot mistakes which can be easily corrected without disrupting the plateau flow. Accepting our little lot in the world on this plateau, we also demand of ourselves that we do this level right more and more of the time. Practice makes perfect eventually, but also you can consider that repetition irons out mistakes for a base level, which then becomes the foundation or launch pad for taking the next, steep learning section of the curve.
For a team with inconsistent results, taking this mental approach also allows for this kind of failure mode analysis- what goes wrong, how often and perhaps why. It can be that the helm in particular, has been pushing too hard - taking manoevres too fast, being too gung-ho on the start line, not paying attention to positioning and right of way boats......then the helm needs to be jacked down a notch and realise that they should sail to what they can do and not reach for the area they can't.
Raising Your Game Means Opening Your Mind
A plateau time may feel a little bland at points, but you get a lot out of it : the motor abilities and 'auto pilot' effect is very strong for the whole team in particular. But as mentioned you also get food for thought in what areas are weak.
Further to this though, you need to be open to new learning and new input. As the season reaches an end, a wry sailor may mention buying new sails in the spring and ask for tips from a sail maker if they can sail with them an evening for example. Or there may be winter courses in warmer climes, or courses to look at into the coming year. As I blogged on before you may want to look at sailing dinghies, or crewing on another boat as a way of breaking your familiarity and opening you up to new learning experiences. You may want to do some quite different crew team building.
Going back to the food-for-thought from your plateau time, it is really important to scrutinise these, group them under the main headings and prioritise or make a sequence of these.
Goal setting for the new steep bit of the curve then should comprise both analysis of your weaknesses from the season and any external input, and also some going out and looking at the blue sky - what is available. Much of all of this means above all one thing which boat owners can struggle with - swallowing your pride. It may take the owner of a 40 foot regatta machine to go back to sailing a wayfairer at a sailing school in order for them to make that next step up the curve in their ability and results.
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