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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