Left: cracking windward drop by the crew of the French One Tonner Corum Rubis at the 1991 Admiral’s Cup series (which the French three-boat team won) but they are still going to come out behind and to leeward of the much bigger Irish IOR 50 Jameson. No TP52-style winch-driven takedown spool, of course, just a sweating navigator down below pulling the chute in, egged on by impatient team-mates. Pity the handful of boats slow to sheet on at this start (above) at the 2019 Snipe Worlds. There is so little line sag we guessed there would be universal use of GPS… but, no, all electronics are banned in this still very competitive class
three factors control who the winner will be: 1) position, 2) momentum, 3) who turns first. You get two out of the three factors on your side and you win the
contest. You don’t and… you don’t! Position means being strong relative to the other boat on the new gybe, ie on their wind. Momentum is the same as we talked about in starting – a little speed edge at the point of turn. Turning first, that is simply pro-active vs re-active. Two factors are enough to win. Don’t try it until you have two, and remind yourself constantly of that fact. 5) Leeward markThe goal of rounding the leeward mark is to be able to sail straight, as in not to have to tack right away. Oh, I am assuming you have the big balloon sail safely down below and the upwind sails pulled in, and people on the rail to keep the boat from tipping over. If you can sail straight out of the leeward mark this will be the fastest way to race the boat. You don’t want to get into the bad wind of the other boats that have already rounded the mark. Being forced to tack right around the mark is going to lead to additional losses. Sailing straight away from a leeward mark requires one thing: a
lane to sail in! As in just slightly to windward of the boat ahead, not a big lane, a thin one will do. After all, we are not trying to pass anyone at this point, just trying to limit the damage. And the damage will be severe if we drop to leeward of the boats ahead. Sailing straight is easy if you’re leading. Where you have to be
and chat working on upwind speed where the gains are tiny compared to downwind. Everyone on the boat needs to get stuck into their work of using every gain: puffs, waves and crew weight, from the second you round the top mark until you get to the bottom. You work your butt off to gain two boat lengths upwind, whereas
downwind there is five times that gain on offer. Fight for every inch, and downwind there are lots of inches everywhere around you. But you have to get stuck into your work to realise the gain. Keep whispering to yourself ‘technique technique technique’. If you have to put your brain in neutral for a momentary mental
break, do it upwind where there is less to lose! 4) The match gybeWe have all been there dozens of times, and it goes like this: a close battle with another boat downwind. The call is ‘no one move, but if the other boat gybes we are gybing’. A well-executed gybe will mean we pass or successfully defend this threat, so we need a good one, boys & girls! Sorry, not true. The pass or defence will be predetermined by the
‘two-out-of-three rule’. There are three factors to a match gybe contest. Does not matter if you’re ahead, defending, or behind attacking, these
really clever is when you’re not leading. Funnily enough, you don’t really want to have your bow right on the stern of the boat ahead of you, but half a boat-length gap works better. What you do want is to be going faster than the boats around you when you round the mark. All boats round the same mark as closely as they dare and not
touch it. How you get to windward from that point is using the advan- tage of extra boatspeed to smoothly set up a boat width to windward of the boats ahead. Not getting greedy here, just trying to survive, to sail straight for the next minute or so. How do you create extra speed to round the mark? Boat positioning,
smooth rate of turn and sail trim that matches the rate of turn. You can sail extra distance to position your boat for a smoother turn because, as I said, being close to the boat in front is not our goal, more speed is. It’s a team sport because the rate of turn and sail trim need to match each other perfectly. Really you want the mainsail trim just ahead of the jib trim to help the turn, but that is what I mean by perfect. Just pulling the sails in and turning tight on the mark won’t give you much chance of having a lane out of the bottom mark. It does not matter if you are racing your OK dinghy, TP52 or a
Contessa 32, these notes still apply. Actually, these five plus another 150. But let’s get the whole team onto these five first… then we can bite off the next five.
q SEAHORSE 35
ANDREW WOODLEY/ALAMY
MATIAS CAPIZZANO
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