PRESS RELEASE:
Boston College maintains their consensus #1 ranking, followed by Georgetown. Big movers this time are the College of Charleston to #3, and Roger Williams, tied for #4 with the Harvard Crimson. Check out our panelists comments and rankings!!!
Stay tuned for our next update coming soon!
By Vince Casalaina:
a strong 6 min. interview with Paul Cayard going back in time. He’s relaxed and engaging as he tells some inside stories about his early days in the Cup and later in the Whitbread.
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!
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
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/
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