There are a thousand specific maneuvers, moves, and concepts that sailors practice when they go out for a session of training. Every sailor has particular level of ability for each of those items. Every sailor also has gaps in his or her game that, if closed, would bring success more often on the racecourse.

Two years ago at the CISA Clinic we asked Zach Railey to get up and speak after dinner to our crowd of 110 youth sailors, 25 coaches and some of the ABYC membership. He could have spoken about anything he wanted to, but he chose to speak about “Goal Setting” and very eloquently demonstrated the value of breaking down his Olympic campaign into very small pieces. When you start any effort to become better, you have to start with the fundamentals. He returned to the concept that when you break a campaign down into its most basic concepts, you can start attacking them one by one. Before you know it you’ve improved in the leaps and bounds you envisioned.

Sometimes its easy to see what you want to achieve and think, “That’s way out of reach.” But, with effective practice, you can close the gaps between you and that goal. Each time you go out to practice it should be to conquer one of those bite-size fundamental concepts that Zach was alluding to. While biting off these pieces of a giant idea, we can rest assured that we’re watching the time tick by on our way to mastering that concept. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers he says that in order to be an expert you need to have 10,000 hours of experience in a certain subject. I would argue that you can spend 10,000 hours doing something, but if you don’t use those 10,000 hours effectively, you may still be lacking in your expertise.

Let’s say you want to get better in heavy air sailing for a regatta to be held in a windy venue this spring. Your goal should be to master all aspects of that concept as best you can. Ian and I trained last year with that mentality that we should be better at heavy air sailing so that our maneuvers were never going to negatively impact our tactics and strategy at the 2011 Worlds in a heavy air venue in Perth. We broke our training sessions in Annapolis into shorter and more focused efforts. Spending long days on the water was important from time to time to increase our overall endurance, but there is enormous value to focused interval training. When you train in short sprints and focus on mastering minor skills, the mind and body retains the memory of achieving the goals of those efforts. We had 15 days to train in Annapolis over the course of October and early November. Not all of those days were windy enough to justify the type of training we were looking for. We trained other concepts on light air days, and used moderate days to improve on general maneuvers from our list, but we had 5 days with 18 knots and we knew we had to use them very carefully. Obviously you do more than just the specific goals listed during any practice, but we carefully watched, remembered and debriefed these specific concepts on the days we set them as our goals. We could capitalize on good days from Annapolis by behind ahead of the curve once we arrived for additional training in Perth:

Day 1: Upwind De-Powering (minimal tacking), Downwind Sailing (body placement and steering, minimal gybing)
Day 2: Upwind Steering, Downwind Steering (Day 1 continued)
Day 3: Upwind Hiking intervals, Downwind heavy air gybing
Day 4: Upwind Tacking Practice, Downwind Leeward Mark roundings
Day 5: Downspeed pre-start maneuvering, Windward Mark roundings

Each previous days’ work would contribute to the next. Each previous day was a building block for the next. By Day 2 we had a better idea about how to set the boat up and how the boat is supposed to feel thanks to our better understanding of how to depower. Without taking care of the steering first, how could good tacks be achieved? These days were not all consecutive. There were sometimes a couple in a row and then a week in between, but because we debriefed all the concepts ad nauseum they were burned into our heads so we could quickly review before we went sailing in heavy air again. Sometimes it is too easy to only practice the things you are already good at, or things that seem more fun on the day. Only by sticking to an organized plan can you ensure that you cover all your bases. By the time we got to Australia, we had a year’s experience in all kinds of breeze conditions, but were particularly well set up for breezy conditions. We trained and raced on some perilously windy days where other teams were not happy about having to go out for fear of breaking equipment, but because of our training we were able to focus on the racing instead of surviving the day of sailing, an important distinction.

Later in the year we’ll talk about breaking down a maneuver list to help practice sessions. We made such a list for the Match Race Clinic at the Rose Cup at Balboa Yacht Club last spring. Here’s a sneak peak and how you could start breaking down your practice sessions to help master a particular aspect of your game. The Maneuvers Checklist: match-race-maneuvers-checklist-1.pdf

And if you don’t like practice, or just want some help making excuses you can commiserate with my fellow Hoya, AI:

The remnants of Hurricane Irene had swept all the way across the Atlantic after slamming into New England and were rumbling across Ireland while we were there. How on earth can you predict the breeze in a whirling weather mess like that, much less training and a regatta? Our US Sailing team forecaster was using his models, but they were a few hours old by the time we we read the predictions and older than that by the time we were racing. With a low pressure system that crazy, the weather was changing by the minute. Forecasting for as small a time frame as one 15 minute leg in one race was almost impossible for even the best meteorologists.

Good forecasting depends heavily on the sailor’s interpretation of real weather conditions during the day of racing. No forecast is perfect. Last week in Rule #4 we talked about how history can be dangerous. Forecasting weather for meteorologists demands the same type of pattern recognition that sailors use for tactical situations. The sailor must take it upon him or herself to understand why a forecast called for certain conditions and then confirm that those conditions still exist while racing. If the conditions have changed, in all likelihood, the forecast should have changed.

Rule #5: Having the forecast is nice. Knowing how to interpret the forecast is important. Knowing when the forecast is irrelevant and making your own decisions about what will happen based on what you see can be critical. Use the forecast to your advantage, but don’t rely on it too heavily.

Any sailor’s basic forecast will have a standard format including, but not limited to: the expected temperatures for the day, general conditions (sunshine, high clouds, low clouds, scattered rain, rain, t-storms), breeze range in knots (0-5, 5-10, 8-12, 10-15, 12-18, 15-20, 18-25, 25+ etc.), expected breeze direction on the compass (some range like 180-220 or 310-350, etc), tide information and range, expected current direction, and maybe seastate (1-2 foot chop, 4 foot ground swell from 220, etc.). Anybody who has ever looked at the WIND and DIRECTION columns in the forecast and then shut the computer and went sailing? Raise your hands! I know you’re out there. I’ve done that before. We all have.

The best forecasts will have a discussion to augment the data listed above. Meteorologists rely on models to predict what will happen based on historical data that matches up the with patterns they see. The discussion is the forecaster’s opportunity to hedge against the models’ predictions. The discussion is the most important part of the forecast! Often there will be nuggets of information that can help your racing even when the forecast goes bad. We’ve all had a forecast go bad. It happens all the time: The forecast calls for a light northwesterly, and sure enough by 2 o’clock the seabreeze is pumping from the southeast! It’s so easy to blame the forecast for being wrong. But if we had only read between the lines in the forecast, there might have been a hedge against the model’s predictions. Here’s how that might have gone:

ACME Sailor’s Weather Service for Miami, FL:
Morning: 8-12 knots, Direction: 300-340
Afternoon: 3-7 knots, Direction: 310-350
Conditions: High overcast and cool 64F in the morning. Clearing and warmer 74F in the afternoon

If that’s all the information we had, we would expect to see the breeze get lighter and veer to the right over the course of the day’s racing. But without the temperature and cloud forecast, it makes it very difficult to confirm the forecast with the reality that we see on the water. If we get on the water in the morning and the breeze is only 4-10 knots and the sun is already shining and you’re peeling off spray tops in the 75 degree heat, it might be time to ditch the specifics of the forecast but hang onto the concept. The meteorologist might have had a discussion like this:

Forecast confidence is below average. The offshore flow should be the dominant breeze in the morning. If the cloudcover remains, the NW breeze will remain throughout the day, dying to 0-5 knots by dusk. (Hedge: If the sun comes out inland, heating may cause a thermal condition encouraging the SE seabreeze to come in. Indications will be warmer conditions around midday and the appearance of small cumulus clouds across the course area.)

Herein lies the key point that might save a race. If everybody in the fleet read the first part of the forecast and ignored the discussion, they might be expecting the standard Miami northerly: big oscillations and variation in breeze strength generally favoring the left side of the course. But, during the first race, if the heat comes on and the breeze starts to die, its the observant sailors that start looking to the right side of the course over towards Key Biscayne for the seabreeze to start making a serious impact on the race.

There are a thousand examples of forecasts being wrong. But knowing the patterns and applying them yourself is the real trick. When Ian and I looked at the forecast for Dublin during the Europeans on windguru.com we saw some very clear shifts based on the hourly forecasts provided:

If you look closely at the forecast for Sunday September 4th (the top left part of the forecast marked Su 04) it gives the hourly strength (in color-coded knots) and direction (by the arrow). Note also it provides temperature in Celcius, cloud-cover high-level, mid-level, and low-level percentages, and rain in a rate of millimeters per 3 hours.

Our racing started about 11 o’clock, so we had to infer from the forecast what would happen during the day. On Sunday September 4th, it looked as though we would sail out in a light southerly that would quickly build to about 20 knots as the rain started early afternoon.

Now the forecast says that it wouldn’t rain that hard before 13h (1 o’clock), but if we matched the forecast to the reality of what we saw on the course we could get a good idea of how to set the boat up. We knew that when we saw the rain start coming down that we should get set up for breezy conditions. We also knew that as the rain stopped we could watch for the breeze to shift to the west as indicated by the forecast for the next few days. Would it all happen in the same timeframe listed by the windguru forecast? Who knows!?! If we had interpreted it too literally we might have been left scratching our heads because at 13h it hadn’t started raining yet and the breeze was still 8-10 knots from the southwest. We might have been caught with our rig too depowered for the light air conditions. Instead, we stayed ready for light air but kept our eye out for the indications that the breeze might pick up. Sure enough, at 16h (4 o’clock) when rain clouds started sweeping down from the hills of Dun Loaghaire, we knew that we should wait to depower the rig until the rain brought windier conditions.

Its important to have an idea of what the forecaster predicts for a day’s sailing. But its more important to arm yourself with the ability to recognize when the trend is correct and when its incorrect. In my example about Miami, it might be more important to forget about the forecast and just go with what you see on the course. In Dublin we remembered what the forecast said and just delayed its application by an hour or two. Forecasts are just a meteorologists interpretations of the computer models. The sailor always has the advantage of realtime live information to make his or her decisions on the racecourse. Knowing the forecast can only get you so far. Knowing how apply the forecast to the day of sailing can win and lose a sailboat race.

Race 7
With the the wind finally moving into the more southern quadrant of the bay, it opened up the course tactically. We started at the boat end and held a great lane to the top left. We tacked on top of the fleet and held steady pressure to put ourselves toward the front. We tacked in front of the lead group and rounded just behind the ARG boys in 2nd. We had a very unpredictable downwind but found a great lane to extend away from the pack. We rounded the bottom marks equal first with GRE and split sides. We played the same tactics upwind again and rounded in 2nd to the Greeks. We held off a late charge by the NED brothers and took a 2nd across the line.

Race 8
Feeling confident in our decision making and boat speed we knew what to do. We started at the boat end again with a great start and were able to put the bow down and roll the majority of the fleet. Unfortunately a small right shift came through and we were unable to cross the fleet when we wanted. We held out for a little more pressure and tacked in a comfortable lane. We sailed fast and approached the top mark in the top 5. With so many boats approaching and exiting the mark at the same time we had to navigate through some traffic before tacking. BAM! And we stopped… As it turned out while attempting to keep clear of the second place boat (RSA) we didn’t quite leave enough space and consequently caught their shroud through our deck while they were setting the spinnaker. We both immediately stopped with one boat pointing downwind and us pointing upwind. We immediately checked that everyone was okay and then set about to dislodging ourselves. After a few minutes we found it impossible and had to ask our coach to come over and help. After trying to pull us apart with no luck we set about to taking down our sails which required assistance from the coaches. After dropping sails RSA had to loosen their rig tension and pull out the shroud pin and let it pull through our deck. Not a pretty sight but happy to come away uninjured. At the end of the day we were scored a RAF for retiring from the race because of a foul.

At the end of the day we are tied for 5th and still have a shot at the medals if we put together a solid day tomorrow. Our boat was fixed within 4 hours and is fully ready to go tomorrow. Happy to report there was no major structural damage and it was mostly cosmetic.

Full results HERE

Race 5
With the wind a little unstable we elected for a boat end start because there appeared to be more pressure there. We got an alright start but soon found ourselves tacking out right. we had good position but either tacked to early or not early enough. We sailed through a big shift to get left thinking it would be better but found ourselves quickly in the back. We kept our heads in it and sailed our best to catch up to 11th.

Race 6
We tried to position ourselves for the first pressure coming down the course but got just to far left to get the full benefit. We got a great start but being just out of the pressure fell behind. We tried to play shifts again but had a hard time putting a solid upwind together. We rounded well back again and set to work. We steadily passed boats but made our big gain on the second upwind when we headed right. We hooked into some good breeze and came back into the pack around 8th. We passed another boat on the run and managed a 7th across the line.

Still plenty of racing and lots of points to gain. Currently standing 6th. Full results HERE

Race 2
After discussing with our coaches we decided left looked like a good bet with better pressure and angle. We got a good start and continued in our lane to the left side. Things werent looking so good at the time with boats inside getting more pressure and shift, so we tried our hardest to make the left work. Eventually we gave in and had to take a tack back to cover our losses. We caught a magic lane through the middle of the course on port tack and sailed right back up to the front. We rounded in 5th/6th and worked our way downwind. We managed to keep close to our lead pack only to pick up one boat who received a penalty for kinetics prior to the final leg. We were across the line in 4th.

Race 3
Again the left looked good but so did the right… We headed out left with a good start and tried to work our shifts. The left group just got in front of us but we found a good lane under them and held our way to the mark. We rounded in 3rd and set off on the run getting into 2nd. Unfortunately at the bottom we made a big tactical error and were swallowed up by the pack behind us and were sent the wrong way on the next upwind. We were able to sail our way back up from 8th/9th to 5th by the finish line.

Race 4
Deciding the left was better once again we won the pin end and sailed as fast as we could out to the left side. We hooked into some pressure and took it across to the top right to round about 3rd. Again we had a pretty solid downwind staying right with the leaders. At the bottom marks we split right and were looking good initially. We had difficulty coming back and the left group just got in front of us. But just to confuse us even more the SWE team who went more right then us beat us to the mark also! We tried our hardest downwind to come back but got a little lost with the shifts and could only manage a 9th at the line.

Standing 5th overall with plenty of racing to go in difficult conditions. Results HERE

Race 1

With the sea breeze dying we looked to the right for steadier pressure. We got a good start at the boat end and held our lane to the far left side of the course. A few boats from the left beat us to the shift and we elected to tack under them. We continued to play the inside of the left and briefly had a chance to cross into 3rd but missed the opportunity. We settled for a 5th place rounding at the 1st mark and set off on the reach. Heading down the run we struggled with out speed and lost a boat by the gate. We decided to go right again and briefly had caught back up to 4th but missed out on a late left shift as the breeze began to really drop. We settled for a 6th at the last upwind mark and held our position across the line.

Generally happy with the first race of the series and there are plenty more to come. It won’t be easy with so many of the worlds top 470 sailors in such a small fleet!

Results HERE

Every day we race sailboats we take with us a foundation of experience unique to each one of us. That’s one of the beautiful things about our sport. Sailors race in small boats by themselves, and small boats with other people, or big boats with tons of other people, and sometimes big boats by themselves. They race on odd little lakes as well as massive expanses of freshwater. They sail on the clear blue of the ocean as well as the nasty culs of the sea. Some race against the tidal currents while others dodge airplane jet outflow. When we travel to some of these spectacular and less-than-so locations around the globe we drag along an ever-growing bundle of experiences that we can then apply to whatever situation we happen upon on a given day. No matter where we are, whether it be the home club where we’ve raced hundreds of races over the decades, or a brand new spot we have experience from which we can detect patterns to help match up with reality and react accordingly. Great sailors learn how to apply their experience to a new location. That’s why some sailors can excel no matter the racing venue. They recognize patterns developed from their own experience and meld them to the forces at work in an unfamiliar location. They use rules of thumb and are keenly aware of the changing dynamics that might demand alterations of their approach to the day’s racing.

But how many times have we been to the regatta and had the locals say: “It’s never like this here!” We had those very words come from the mouths of locals in Fremantle at the 2011 ISAF World Championships after four days of less than 12 knots of breeze from all kinds of funny directions. For the years leading into the event the world was preparing for 18-25 knot seabreezes. Even the weeks leading into the regatta were classic Fremantle Doctor days. Then the regatta started and things were somehow not expected. Sailors might have painted themselves into a corner by preparing only for breezy conditions or bringing sails tailored for breeze. If there had been a local fleet of Starboat sailors, they might have been the toughest in the world in 18 knots or more, but would have been brought back to earth by the variance in conditions.

Rule #4 in our list of 50: History can be dangerous.

Sailors are notoriously superstitious. Maybe not in the same way as they used to be. Modern sailboat racing can barely relate with whaling ships and tales of the kraken, but sailors do have their tendencies to rely on those gems of history. We’ve all heard the comments before a day’s racing:

“You always go right in Long Beach”
or
“The left is always better in Fremantle.”

How many times have we said to ourselves:

“Well, the left won the last race, so maybe we’d better head that way this race because it will probably happen again.”

These are dangerous statements. Sailboat racing is a game of too many dynamics to fall into the rut that we should always go right in Long Beach. Sure, over the averages of time since before any of us were born (no matter how old you are), if two boats split to opposite sides of the racecourse in Long Beach, CA, the boat on the right might win 70% of the time. The averages are overwhelmingly in favor of one side over the other when the conditions are just right. But, for every two boats that have won on the right in Long Beach, there has been one that won on the left. Was it just an accident? Should we just blindly stumble off to the right and play the odds that we might win? When it comes to local knowledge and more so when it comes to race-to-race decisions, what just happened in the past should often be forgotten.

Take history with a grain of salt. The decision-making process about what to do in the next race should be fresh. It is important to understand what parts of the previous race are applicable to the next and what parts are not. Has the current changed directions or strength? Will the breeze oscillate? Too often sailors see conditions that existed for 10 minutes and believe that as law for the rest of the day. For the most part I argue against splitting tacks before the first race of the day for that reason. Weather and course conditions are often so variable, they can make information five minutes old obsolete. It is absolutely vital in sailboat racing to be aware of conditions as they are changing and not depend on information from conditions in the past. Recognizing the patterns is critical and then correctly reacting is paramount.

The best sailors in the world are aware of what has happened, but most importantly they are constantly aware of the conditions at present. Each decision made on the racecourse should be an assessment of the conditions and positioning at the moment, aware but not dependent on history. They use their unique experience to recognize the patterns as they see them, even in unfamiliar sailing locations. The reasons why some locations are notoriously favored towards one side or the other are usually reasons that can be deduced from observing the situation. It is more important to know why a location has certain tendencies than it is to know what those tendencies are. If we know why, then we can recognize when the patterns match up and when they don’t. In both cases we can take advantage of the situation and not leave it up to the statistical average. Knowing why it favors the right in Long Beach 70% of the time enables us to still have the advantage when the 30% conditions are present. The phrase in investing strategy that anybody can win when the bull market, but the best can win in a bear market holds true in sailboat racing too. Relying on history can be valuable only up to a point, and then it becomes very dangerous. Understanding why historical data happened and then recognizing the patterns instead of relying on that data will improve our chances to succeed on the racecourse.