1st real boat ? sailing lake erie , niagara river & lake ontaro, i have a lot to learn ! sailed my 15′ albacore 3 yrs.loved it! any help would be welcomed!
Demystifying Match Racing And A Look At The Chicago Match Race Center
By Airwaves Editor Jen Vandemoer Mitchell
Match racing, called the fastest growing discipline in sailing, has many people captivated and a lot of people still trying to understand it. Most are familiar with match racing due to the renowned America’s Cup, which had its first challenge race in 1870. Match racing is a one-on-one duel between equally matched boats that challenges tactics, strategy, and boat handling. Understanding match racing starts with the rulebook in Appendix C, where the rules of hunting are modified and right-of-way appears to become even more integral in the game. Although match racing has been around for quite some time, it seems that it did not become mainstream in the United States until Women’s Match Racing was added as a division in the 2012 Olympics. Here is a basic look at the game of match racing. This is meant to be a basic overview a teaser so that you can learn more for yourself and start to get involved.
Match Races start with two one-design (usually) boats that are equally matched. One boat displays a yellow flag and the other a blue flag. In the start the two boats are not allowed to engage with each other until 4 minutes to the start. The blue boat waits at the pin and the yellow at the boat. Once the sequence is within 4 minutes the boats engage in an exciting pre-start battle. Of course the goals are for someone to start prematurely, draw out a foul or have a clean start ahead of the other boat. The races are approximately 20 minutes in length and are sailed on a Windward-Leeward twice around course with marks to starboard and a downwind finish. The races are umpired by two sets of umpires, each assigned a boat to look after. The umpires make on the course penalty decisions that help to eliminate off the water protests and keep the racing fun and exciting. One unique aspect of the penalty system is that if a boat is marked with a penalty they can take their penalty at any time during the race before the finish line. This way if the other boat incurs a penalty, the penalties cancel each other out and neither boat needs to spin. However, if a boat accumulates three penalties in a race they are disqualified. This is a very brief look at what match racing entails.
Match racing events are graded 1-5 and the grading defines the level of the competitors in the event in addition to other aspects of how the event is run and who is umpiring it. For example Grade 1 is the highest caliber event, it is an international event and requires that the majority of the skippers participating have a world ranking in the top 10. At the other end of the scale is a Grade 5 event, which is a local match race regatta that meets the match racing standards, but does not require a certain caliber sailor or a certain number of participants. ISAF maintains the list of rankings for match racing competitors and this determines what grade events a sailor can compete in. It sounds a bit complicated, but the more exposure you get in the discipline the more sense it makes.
There are great resources available to learn about match racing aside from studying the call book. North U with Dave Perry has put together a very informative DVD called, Welcome to Match Racing. The US Sailing website has great information as well as the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) website. Youth clinics and regattas are all over the nation this summer, a calendar of these events can be found on the US Sailing website. Match racing also made its debut in college sailing this past fall at the ICSA Match Racing National Championship. Many viewers were able to catch the action online via webcast supported by the Chicago Match Race Center.
Match racing venues and facilities are starting to crop up across the nation and near by in Canada. One of the first facilities in the nation that has made many match races possible is the Chicago Match Race Center (CMRC). Co-founders and elite sailors, Don Wilson and Bill Hardesty have developed a top-notch match race training facility for professional and amateur sailors. They hosted their first event in June of 2009. Tod Reynolds, the Program Director for the CMRC, explains that they “took the best aspects of the match race centers in the world and brought it to Chicago.” They host world-class regattas in the summer and have weekly training programs. The facility has ten Tom 28s, four Elliott 6ms, motorboats (for tending to practices and races) and a seventy-five foot houseboat (that acts as their headquarters in the summer, a banquet place and a VIP spectator boat during events).
The facility is not a learn-to-sail center, but a place where racers go to take their racing to the next level. “It is a great facility to bridge the gap between college and all other kinds of sailing,” Tod says. CMRC makes themselves accessible for youth sailors by providing a discount for sailors under the age of twenty-five. “A team of four sailors under twenty-five could join and sail for a summer for $1000,” Tod explained, “We really want young sailors to get involved.” As is safest with larger boats the youngest a sailor can be at the CMRC is sixteen. Anyone can be a member at the facility and some perks that membership includes are twice-a-week practices, targeted skill practices, and the use of the boats when they are available. The CMRC has teams come in from all over the world to practice for a week and take advantage of the great facility.
CMRC has a great staff including new sailing manager, ICSA Match Race Champion, Taylor Canfield, a group of elite (Bill Hardesty, Steve Hunt, to name a few) part-time coaches, and new this summer will be six interns who range from college sailors to just out of college sailors. The interns will help with running the facility, but will also get a lot of opportunities to get on the water and sail themselves. “We will be experimenting a lot this summer, we will work on how to get more people involved and give match racing a try”, Tod is spearheading new developments at the facility and is very excited for their summer line-up. CMRC will be hosting the most match race events in the U.S. and they are thrilled to host their first Grade 1 event in late September. They are very proud of their ability to run high-caliber events and
will certainly keep honing their skills in the future. Tod explained another goal for CMRC will be to get their staff involved in umpiring, “there are some great match race certified umpires out there, but the number of graded events in the U.S. has doubled this year from thirty events to sixty-three. With this growth more umpires will be needed.”
Now it is time to get out there and start match racing. Find a clinic, get reading and reach out to sailors at your local yacht clubs. If this is not encouragement enough, take a look at the video clip below showing footage from the Miami Open Elliott 6m Match Race that CMRC and Sail Sheboygan co-hosted in February.
Chicago Match Race Center
Strategy is Good, Tactics are Evil, by Ken Legler
By Airwaves Contributor Ken Legler
Are strategy and tactics not the same? Strategy is you versus the race course, including wind, current, position of marks, and obstacles. Tactics is you versus the other boats, including maneuvers such as ducking, dipping, lee bow, blanketing, and of course asserting your right-of-way. Strategy is what you use to get around the race course as fast as possible. Tactics are what you use to pass, or prevent being passed by other boats. Here are some sound bites, followed by explanations. The general idea is to avoid encounters with the other boats while sticking to your strategy.
Find the line.
Start where the others are not.
When boat A hails starboard to boat B, boats C gains.
Conserve your tacks.
Overlay the windward mark and the traffic to round at high-speed.
Lateral separation is better in the long run.
Round the gate mark with the path of least resistance.
Finding the starting line is an obvious strategical concern but it gets hard in traffic when the pin is obscured. Look often enough to get a glance for that moment it becomes visible as it is not enough to see only the committee boat when determining the exact line. On your final approach when on starboard, look around your forestay to find the pin and over your right shoulder to find the committee boat. We peripheral vision covering nearly 135° you can almost see both ends at once when you are about two lengths from the line.
Start where the others are not works extremely well in a variable wind. Most boats pile into the temporarily favored end causing horrible starts for each other. In a variable wind the trick is not to start at the favored end but to sail off on the lifted tack. When there is a big right shift before the start, the committee boat gets real crowded. Most of the boats there will either foul, be fouled, get stuck, get blanketed, or be forced to tack out into the anti-shift, a disaster when the wind shifts back to the left later. You take the easy start down the line on the lifted starboard tack, and when the wind backs left, you are now contesting first place with the lone survivor of the boat end pack. When there is a big left shift before the start, the pin, or “devil’s playground” gets really hairy. Try starting mid line with your windward hip clear so you can tack to port on the lifted tack. In a steady wind you should still look for the least crowded part of the line unless one end is truly biased. In that case you could slide up towards the favored end until it gets too crowded for comfort. The worst the bias the harder it is to duplicate good starts.
How does boat C gains when boat A hails starboard to boat B? B is distracted at best and needs to sail an alternate route to avoid A. A meanwhile, has to watch B in order to ensure she doesn’t hit B. She might be lee bowed by B as well. C then, continues to go straight on the fastest course to mark.
Tacking comes at a cost, and with boats that don’t tack well, a big cost. Tacking costs more in a dinghy when you are hiking hard then when it is light and roll tacks are more effective. 420s for example, lose so much tacking in winds of 15 knots and above, that many sailors on a short course will try to two-tack the first leg. The same sailors in the same 420s on a light and shifty day might tack many times. Catamarans are notorious for slow tacking since they lose all the speed they build up when going straight. Good multihull sailors always conserve their tacks. The jib-less Hobie 14 comes to mind as the worst boat to tack. Sailors in this class often try start on port so they will only have to tack once to fetch the windward mark. Even dinghy team racers, hiking hard in Vanguard 15’s, will occasionally try to one-tack the first leg into their starboard rounding crossing ahead of opponents that tacked two or more times.
A student sailor once complained that he laid the weather mark perfectly but got screwed when lee bowed while trying to round. The resultant loss meant not laying and tacking, then tacking back for traffic, and not laying again. When the smoke cleared he was last. Only the first place boat has the luxury of laying the mark perfectly, all others need to overlay the traffic in order to put the bow down just before rounding. This gives you a little breakaway over the neighbors to the offset mark and then clear air on the run. On the other hand, if you pinch around the first Mark, you might spend the entire run leg defending boats from behind rather than using your strategy to gain on the run.
Speaking of run legs, passing boats in traffic not only gives you false gains but can cost you plenty. When A blankets B and passes B, everyone else gains on A and B. Then B, now mad, luffs up across A’s stern, blankets A, and passes A back. A and B believe they broke even but boat C, with good lateral separation, gains considerably on both. When A and B observe C coming out ahead, they believe she was lucky, but it was actually A and B’s greed that allowed C to get ahead. With lateral separation C is able to play the puffs and carve the waves without other boats or blanket zones getting in the way.
Gate marks were invented by Paul Elvstrom to keep the race close. With a single leeward mark, when two boats are even, one will come away with a two-length lead. With evenly set gate marks, the same two boats should remain even. As such any boat wishing to minimize their loss at the gate should round the gate mark that offers the path of least resistance. There are exceptions, such as when one side of the next leg is heavily favored or one gate mark is heavily favored. In that case the favored mark should be treated like a single leeward mark.
By Ken Legler, Tufts Sailing Coach. Check out Ken’s web page: http://kenleglersailing.com/
© Copyright Sail1Design 2011. All rights reserved. Not to be re-printed without express written permission of Sail1Design & Airwaves®
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Dad To Dad
Dear Mr Hughes, Thank You for taking the time to write this article. For a father with a 12 year old low functioning ASD son I feel what you feel. I am also starting a program this summer, with our maiden launch Sat Jun 25th and will keep you informed. I may need to call for advice all the time.Please don’t consider me a pest. Thank You Sincerely, John C Power Executive Director Project:Believe The Justin Power Foundation 501(c)3 PO Box 727 North Falmouth, MA 02556-0727 EIN 27-4497350 www.linkedin.com/in/thepower “We Speak For Those Who Can Not”@
College TR Fans: Graham Hall Team Race to be Scored Live!
Check out the USNA link to keep track of the Graham Hall Team Race this weekend.
http://usna.edu/sailing/newsite/ic/GrahamHall2011/main.htm
…And check out the ICSA Rankings soon for our first update!
about A parents view
Excelent review, I enjoyed much.
A Parents View: Autism & Teaching Sailing
A parent comes to you as a sailing instructor with a child in tow. You give a furtive glance to the child, as usual you are hoping to make a connection. The child seems oddly unresponsive, and you realize he is avoiding eye contact.
Meanwhile the parent is hurling acronyms at you: ASD,ASP, PDD-NOS, Autism Aspergers. They all mean just one thing: that you have a kid who is on the Autism Aspergers spectrum, and you are going to have to modify your methods somewhat. Your gut feeling is that you have a kid who does not want to be there. You are getting none of the usual cues from the kid– no eye contact, no looking longingly at the boats rigged. Still you say to yourself, “We try to teach everyone.” What you don’t realize is that you have a potentially super dedicated sailor; and if you treat the opportunity correctly, you may well be able to give that child the kind of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that he has never felt in his or her life before. A true lifelong sailor.
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Sailors tend to be self sufficient and enjoy their own company. You probably know someone who is only really happy when he is sailing. It’s likely that the sailors you know like that are on the Autism spectrum. Some famous single handers are notably taciturn; by definition they enjoy their own company and they like everything to be in place. These are all classic autistic traits. The famous French singlehander, Bernard Moitessier, was a poster child for autism. Unable to face the adulation at the finish line in England when he was expected to win the first single handed, round- the-world race, he carried on half way around the world to a place that was in his comfort zonet,Tahiti. |
Some of the symptoms of Autism / Aspergers are:
· An inability or an unwillingness to communicate well.
· Insistence on sameness, resisting change in routine
· No real fear of danger
· Little or no eye contact
· Unresponsiveness to normal teaching methods
· Sustained odd play
· Preferring to be alone
· Noticeable physical overactivity or underactivity
· Tantrums
· Inappropriate attachment to objects
· Uneven gross and fine motor skills
· Thinking in pictures
· Learning by doing rather than watching
After a glance through these symptoms, you’ll realize that these symptoms could apply to most people– and probably many of your friends; but in this population some of these characteristics are taken to extremes. Good sailors, of course, always “think in pictures.” And who has not met a boat owner who does not have an “inappropriate attachment to an object”? –or maybe boats don’t count as inanimate objects.
All US Sailing Level 1 instructors should be familiar with the book “Teaching and Coaching Fundamentals for Sailing.” It’s a great book and not just for sailors. In the first chapter they talk about different learning styles: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Or putting it in ordinary language: show them, tell them and let them do it. With this autistic population, as with most groups, the visual and kinesthetic styles are going to work best, with the instructor reserving the auditory for verbal reinforcement. With this group your teaching will have to be more intense and sustained; but the payoffs will be greater. Make the US Sailing book your friend. It’s written by a collaboration of great people; and through its inclusive nature, it has ended up being a great guidebook for teaching these young people.
Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules. You may have seen the Temple Grandin movie, but that won’t help much–in fact there are many fewer girls than boys who are diagnosed with this. When the book says “spectrum,” they mean just that. The fact is, not much is known about this syndrome. It all takes work, patience and perception by you as the instructor. The only thing that can be said is: “If you’ve met one kid on the spectrum, then you have experience with one kid on the spectrum. They are all different”.
Let’s talk about the learning curve. I think we all know that’s a misnomer, and it should be a learning meander. For many of these young people, learning will be in steps, or more like cliffs and plateaus. You may find yourself reinforcing and reiterating one point seemingly fruitlessly; and suddenly it will be indelibly grasped, and they are on to the next plateau.
Again as with all pupils, focus is of paramount importance. With this population, it’s a two edged sword. You’ll have no difficulty having the pupil “get their head outside of the boat. They’ll instinctively be able to view the boat from the proverbial seagull’s eye view, or any view you want. As with all pupils, however, there will inevitably be distractions; and you’ll have to redouble your efforts to keep your pupil focused. This should get easier throughout the lesson because as your young sailors progress , they are more likely to become absorbed in an activity that could have been custom made for them. The rewards will last a lifetime. Sailing will become a refuge where they can control their world and yet make it react to outside forces, just as we all do. You as the instructor may feel pretty good too.
–Gareth Hughes is the Waterfront director at Kennebunk Beach Improvement Association, www.kbia.net, and has an autistic son.
US Olympic Committee response
This was posted in Scuttlebutt 3290: By Dean Brenner, US Olympic Sailing Program Chairman I really enjoyed Joe Morris’s comments in Scuttlebutt 3289 about Olympic Development. It’s an important issue and one that the leadership of US Olympic Sailing takes very seriously. Joe is correct that as of only a few years ago there was no formal development program as part of the US Olympic effort. We are now in our fifth year of this program, and we have made some adjustments each year in an effort to get the program where we want it and need it to be. Joe brings up some important questions, the most fundamental of which is “can a sailor pursue Olympic and college goals at the same time?” We think the answer is yes, but it requires collaboration among the college coach, the Olympic program and the athlete. Some athletes will make college sailing their priority, and that’s great. Other athletes will make Olympic sailing their priority, and that’s also a great choice. It’s really up to the athlete to decide what their own goals are, and then it’s up to the Olympic program and the college coach to help facilitate those goals. Some college programs are clearly willing to help interested athletes pursue both sets of goals, and we’ve partnered with several of them. It’s not always easy, but with good communication and collaboration we usually get to a great place for everyone. One point we feel strongly about, however, is that if a sailor wants to achieve college goals AND Olympic goals, then the wrong way to pursue their Olympic goals is to put them completely on hold for four years. That may help them with their college goals, but ignoring Olympic sailing for that length of time will put the sailor years and years behind their international peers. The best model, we think, is to find a college program where the coach is open to parallel goals, and then create an annual plan that allows for both college sailing and some Olympic sailing. It likely means that neither set of goals gets 100% of the sailor’s attention, but from an Olympic perspective, we would rather have a talented athlete at least partially focused on Olympic sailing for four years, so that when they graduate and focus exclusively on the Games, they are at least part way up the learning curve and not starting from square one. But ultimately, the path needs to start with what the sailor wants, and what he or she (and their family) thinks is best. Good coaches (college and Olympic) will then collaborate in the best interest of the athlete. College sailing and Olympic sailing require different skill sets, as Joe correctly points out. And if the athlete wants both, then both sets of skills need to be developed in a parallel fashion. Will it be easy? No way. But if it were everyone would be a national champion, an All-American and an Olympic medalist.
Stanfords John Vandemoer: College and Olympic Sailing Response
College and Olympic Sailing Response, by John Vandemoer, head varsity sailing coach at Stanford University
This is the fourth in an AirWaves Series on Youth-to-College-to-Olympic sailing. Enjoy!
Brought to you by Mauri Pro Sailing
| College sailing is absolutely a path to Olympic sailing, is it right for everyone? Probably not, but that is what’s great about being human; what is right for one is not necessarily right for another. In Joe and Stu’s article, and in most of the responses the points were based on actually sailing, but I think college sailing and college itself benefits Olympic campaigners immensely in different ways. |  |
My experience with Olympic level sailing is different than some, I live vicariously through my wife, Molly O’Bryan Vandemoer, who as well as being a college All-American and National Champion, has also campaigned 470’s and who is now fully focused on women’s match racing as a member of Team Tunnicliffe. Listening to her recap her challenges and successes during training sessions and World Cup events I can’t help but think of the lessons learned in college sailing. College sailing is much more then boat handling, short course tactics, and starts, it is about working within a team, managing your life, and dealing with relationships with teammates, coaches, umpires, race committee, etc. College sailing is a crash course for life lessons.
A successful college team is one that works together to become better; the players all focus on improvement and hard work to build each individual’s ability into team strength. The current system for USSTAG seems to be built around the basic college sports model: work together, share, and make each other stronger. These are all lessons of a strong college team.
The next life lesson that college sailing imparts is dealing with your emotional IQ, a successful sailor is one that can control their temperament and stay focused on racing well. Sailing is a tough sport, maybe even the toughest with all the variables that contribute to it. Being able to manage your emotions and deal with your competitors, coaches, race officials and judges is a mandatory skill for success. Everyone has had a race, at any level that was affected by a variable outside of your control; it is how you handle these variables that makes you a champion. College sailing pushes these challenges at you every weekend with tough venues, changing conditions, no drop race, umpires and judges with all sorts of experience, and the slew of colorful coaches on the sidelines. Then it throws at you wind delays, protest delays, homework, midterms, and the ever-evolving romantic relationships all in 48 hours. A great college sailor can manage all of these distractions and see the racecourse in front of them. Four years of sailing in college helps you develop a high emotional IQ, it helps you to learn to respect the relationships you have with sailors, coaches and race officials and it keeps you focused on sailing your boat and the race course well.
I see my wife use these lessons everyday in setting up training sessions, working with her team, and dealing with the challenges of her discipline. Will college sailing make you a top-level technical Olympic sailor? No, but it will help you recognize the tools you need to get there which can sometimes be the hardest part. Learning how to learn, how to use coaches, and how to use the resources around you are all the strengths of college and of college sailing.
I like the idea of a college sailor getting international experience and Olympic sailing experience when they can during their four years of college. These experiences make you a better sailor, teammate and person. However, the focus of college should be college, it should be learning in the classroom and learning from those tough choices that come up in a college life. I really feel these are invaluable and will help anyone succeed on the Olympic circuit. I do not think it matters if you win the gold at age 26 or at age 18.
2011 Laser Midwinters East Final Results
Laser Midwinter’s East
February 23-27, 2011
Final Series Results: Laser 4.7 Laser Standard Gold Laser Radial Gold Laser Standard Silver Laser Radial Silver.
