Racing is a process where you are looking for any advantage over the opposition. We tend to coach tactics by likening it to a walk down a corridor, and there are various doors in the wall. You know that one door will lead to a better corridor than another
How many times are you on a line, feeling like you’ve pulled the boss move, and with ten seconds to go, things turn pear shaped and the dream start vaporises? This simple and common situation gives us the first priority.
We have recently completed the national games in Taiwan with a huge success. Our team won 7 out of 8 gold medals and a total of 16 medals out of 21 in the entire event.
Not too long ago in a lot of classes crews could be seen visibly relaxing as the kite went up, and the procession began. Happily now in all racing we understand how to make gains and use the downwind to our advantage.
In modern racing we are often demanded to become short term weather forecasters to help us predict changes within the next 10-20 minutes that will help us to get an advantage over our competitors and sail the course quicker than them.
Throughout the history of sailing it is rarely the fastest sailor that wins a series, In most conditions it is necessary to be fast to win but that's not all. Winning takes many disciplines to master, a crucial one is the ability to observe your surroundings.
When you begin to take any sport seriously, the choice of a coach or coaches will make or break your ambitions. You can see it in all sports, and sailing is certainly no exception.
When we talk sailing, too often people will claim that its primarily a mental game - a game of chess on water which leads to winning. We do not believe this. We believe that first ingredient to success is to have among the best technical and tactical knowledge that you can get, and then the mental game kicks in. This blog is about the mental game and more importantly its development from the start of racing careers.
During a racing beat there are some fundamental differences between different phases of the leg, this mean our decisions and priorities as racers should be different between different parts of the course
The movement of water over a course area is rarely uniform. Because of this factor the racing sailor has to have an understanding of where currents are at their maximum, how this helps or obstructs progress and where a current will take you sideways away from the mark, or sideways towards the mark. Where possible, using current in different areas to enhance the speed around the course can be much more rewarding than finding a lot of boat speed through increased wind speed.
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