Anyone who has sailed against top sailors will know that many times you can be approaching half way up the first beat, and either in front of or in touch with some of the regatta favourites - often alongside them. A minute later the top sailor will have climbed on you, hit a gust of wind that you can’t reach, and gone from high mode to extremely fast forward compared to yourself, and from feeling great, being in touch or ahead of the good guys, you’re suddenly a hundred metres and forty boats behind them within around 90 seconds. This blog is about beginning to understand how they do that, so you can start to do it too!
Trim For Speed and Height
There is a considered observation that we either have high mode or low mode sailors at the top of any fleet. Sailing high or low mode has individual advantages in different conditions, so we have to look carefully at what we mean by high or low mode. The purpose of this blog is to discuss sailing styles and blow some setup myths apart.
The Diamond
A major source of beginning to understand tactics is dealt with by Toplevel sailing as tactics for the first half of the beat (when the boats are diverging into a wider area, as against tactics when the boats are converging into the tiny area around the mark.
Squad or not?
Top sailors spend a lot of time practicing and training on their own. This is against so many “words of wisdom” that the former ISAF give to emerging nations. In fact we can see that young sailors who spend a lot of time training alone are often successful.
Diverging and Converging
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
Downwind Sailing
Many top sailors complain about either their downwind speed or state that they don’t know how to sail downwind. In reality this is usually based on an emotion and mental challenges rather than what an observer may see, but there is can be a hint of truth in such statement as they might be slow in certain conditions. In this article we look at the real deal with both top sailors and amateurs falling into the same errors quite often.
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