Rod Davis
Right turn, Clyde*
Let’s have a chat about leeward mark roundings. I am going to toss my playbook on the table and we can look at how to make the most effective mark rounding. It will require everyone to partake, not just the guy holding the handlebars – the crew is in this, boots and all. No passengers when the big balloon sail has to come down and
the boat trims up on the wind. These tricks of the trade apply if you are sailing a J/70, TP52, classic yacht or OK Dinghy (except for the crew and balloon sail in the case of your OK!). It’s the art of sailboat racing. As opposed to the science of sail shapes and rig tuning. OK, let’s get started. Two cases to consider. You are leading the
race, or you’re following the other boats around the bottom mark. The truth is the two cases only differ in how you position the boat to turn it around the mark. The crew and sail trim stay the same. Let’s clean up a misconception that has been around as long as
I have been racing. ‘You always want to be tight to the mark and on the wind before you round the mark.’ Explore that for a second: to do that you need to sail extra distance, a little over a boat length of extra distance. If you are racing against a stop watch, you would not give up the six seconds (one boat length). The argument of ‘you will be in a better position to throw bad air on the boats behind’ falls over when you realise you can be a full boat length further ahead. Besides, that guy right behind you isn’t going anywhere. He will be into a slow death, fading back as you sail away from the mark. Now the case of not leading the race. This is where the real art
of the team comes into play. When rounding behind others the objective is to go straight for the next 30+ seconds without getting so much gas that the oxygen masks fall from the boom and you just have to tack away. By the way, why am I hellbent to sail 30 seconds before tacking?
The bubble! When a bunch of sailboats get together, like at a bottom mark, the wind field starts to lift over the whole lot of them. The bubble. You don’t want to tack back into that if you can possibly avoid it. Oh, throw in the wakes of all those boats and you will be sailing in a washing machine, with no wind. Not good. First tip from the book – you want to be going faster than the
boat in front. You don’t care if you are extra metres further behind, as long as you are going faster you can make that work for you. I love this part, because this is where most people would leave
it. Nice, go faster than the other boat when rounding the mark… ‘how the hell are we going to do that?’ Here’s how. Rate of turn,
32 SEAHORSE
sail trim and crew weight. I am going to leave the steering part to last because the sail trim and crew weight can’t be overlooked. Main before rudder Always main before rudder. That is how the
boat will carve up into a turn onto close-hauled. It makes the boat want to turn up, rather than having to force the boat up with extra rudder. Note... using extra rudder to turn the boat up is a double whammy. Increased drag and also extra leeway as the rudder has a negative angle making the boat go to leeward. Oh dear! Not what we are looking for right now. So main before rudder but only just. Never so much before that
the tell tales on the leeward side are going in circles. That is stall, really bad for acceleration and, as it so happens, why aeroplanes fall out of the sky. We don’t like stall! Jib worldOver-trimming is bad. Two reasons. A stalled sail takes
twice as long to get flow over it and start providing lift. Lift is the stuff that makes the boat go forward. And, more importantly, an over-trimmed jib works against getting the bow up on the wind. So you are forced to use even more rudder. Much more rudder. The most common team mistake at the leeward mark is the jib
is pulled in too early and the main is flapping, and not leading the rudder, as the trimmer could not keep up. Three causes for this 1) the gennaker or spinnaker came down too late, so trimming started late. This led to 2) a hedge or ‘cheat’, pulling in the jib early, and 3) poor allocation of grunt to pull the mainsail in. With the America’s Cup teams we ran leeward mark rounding
drills without a gennaker. What we learned is that when you take the downwind sail out of the picture the sail trim is 100 per cent better. The boat rounds the mark accelerating or already at full speed. When the team has to take the gennaker down mark round- ings are typically 1.5kt slower and often the speed is on the way down. Because they end up late trimming in. The jib trimmers can see they are going to be late and over-hedge, pulling the jib in early. The solution to problem #1: drop the gennaker or spinnaker (or
whatever balloon-like sail you use) earlier. At the same time be quicker to switch from balloon-down to accurate sail trim. Solution to #2, the hedge. Really we are only worried about the
flow on the leeward side of the sails from 90° to 35° upwind angles. So you can hedge to the 90° trim. That’s fair enough. As the jib will be eased and super-twisted, use the lower tell tales for your trim guide in the final trim up. Your jib trimmers will only hear com- pliments from me if the top is under-trimmed as we are turning up. Mainsheet world Needs to lead the turn by a heartbeat or two.
MAX RANCHI
ALAMY
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