Debrief with Coach Alex

Hello Parents & Sailors,

I’d first like to introduce myself to some of you who may not have met me yet. My name is Alexander (Coach Alex), and while I typically teach Green Fleet here at CRYC, I have worked with RWB in the past in addition to my own racing career. This weekend Romaine was away and I was asked to help out with practice. Given the low number of students, Sarah and I combined our practices, which was awesome! Sarah is obviously very knowledgeable and it was much easier to learn what our students need from someone who has worked with them extensively. I did have a few familiar faces though from our recent green fleet graduates!

This weekend, we worked on light air technique on the water and spoke about draft, twist, and balance in our meeting Saturday. Our light air technique was further refined with video by Omari in the morning on Sunday. The two most important things for upwind in light air over the two days was being able to work high with acceleration and good roll tacks.

While sailing upwind, we have a high mode (pointing) and a low mode (footing). While only separated by a few degrees, each mode has its pros and cons. Point mode brings us closer to the mark but our VMG (Velocity Made Good, a measure of speed towards a particular point) is not always the best because the boat is depowered and therefore slow. Footing mode accelerates the boat, making it go faster, but further away from the mark. This is also not particularly good VMG. Max VMG is accomplished by mixing both modes as we work on gaining speed to point. We go from low and fast to high with speed, which removes some of the speed penalty from point mode and therefore maximizes VMG.

While much could be said about VMG in general and we could expand on the subject another time, the key process to getting upwind on light days (all else equal) is to sail as high as possible with speed for as long as possible. We head down to a footing mode, gain speed, trim the sail, head up until we feel the speed decrease, ease the sail, and then head down to footing mode once more. Even as we sail towards puffs to connect the dots and sail the lifts when possible, this driving technique leads us to fast upwind sailing.

Roll tacks are one of the most desired techniques in principle but one of the worst executed maneuvers in the sport. The point of the roll tack is to push the boat quickly through the no go zone to reduce the drag caused by wind on the bow and the loss of power in the sail that ultimately slows us down through the tack. The reason why it is often not well executed is because of the missing understanding on WHY roll tacking works from a scientific perspective.

Roll tacking allows us to quickly accelerate from the tack because of a change both due to the flick of the leech and the daggerboard, but even more importantly because of a change in the apparent wind. Done correctly, 1: wind attaches better and more quickly to the sail 2: we spend less time in the no go zone 3: we come out of the tack at a high angle with speed. The combination of these three factors not only gives us speed as we come out of the tack, but also gives us height. We therefore conserve VMG on roll tacks.

The technique aspect that is missing most often at the highest level is an ease at the end of the roll tack. In lower levels, the other missing factor is a shoulder pump outboard as the sail breaks but before we duck underneath the sail. I will start with the latter. In the Opti, we often weigh as much or more than the boat. We have a lot of control to force the boat to do as we wish. With a free-standing mast, we can flatten the boat much harder than if it had spreaders, which gives us a better pump. The initial roll, however, sets us up for this hard flatten. As we go to tack, we lower our hand on the mainsheet near the block. Our hands then go in opposite directions: we trim in with one hand as we push the other hand out with the tiller extension SLOWLY (or calmly/smoothly anyway). Finally, we reach a point where the sail can no longer stay full and begins to luff.

At this moment, we use our shoulders as we continue to turn. We pump our shoulders out of the boat before we duck to go beneath the boat. This forces the boat over. Remember, with our weight we can make the boat do what we want as we can physically force the boat to do what we want. Not throwing our shoulders outboard results in us waiting for the boat to turn itself and the sail to be acted upon by gravity. This causes us to exit our tack on a reach rather than in close hauled position, which thereby kills our forward direction and causes the sail to be extremely overtrimmed as we exit the tack alongside where we began the tack, rather than ahead.

When we work with our shoulders in the correct way, the boat turns quickly through the wind and will exit the tack in close hauled position. As we switch sides to flatten, the sail will naturally ease as we near the centerline of the boat. We must keep the sail eased as we flatten because of the forward shift in the apparent wind. We do not want to struggle against the weight in the sail as this means we are sliding sideways as we attempt to flatten the boat. A good ease will propel us with speed. As we lose this speed and the apparent wind returns to a more normal angle, we must then trim to regain a proper angle of attack. Omari’s phrase for the trimming during the roll tack is “Trim, Ease, Ease, Trim.” Trim going in, ease as we cross, ease to open the leech, and then trim back once flow has begun.

Our presentation by Sarah on Saturday was a great talk about some more science behind our sport. Our major point was to try to make everything as simple as possible while understanding that these are fundamental aspects to understanding why we do what we do. Without a good understanding of draft, we cannot tune. Without understanding center of effort, we do not know why we position our body in the ways we do. Without understanding angle of attack and apparent wind, we do not understand why we trim our sail as we do. These concepts are constantly developed as we all continue our efforts to become better sailors. I will say that I remember working with the same concepts and being confused at first. The more we listen to these terms and the more times they are explained to us, the more we absorb and the better we can understand these difficult concepts. Saturday was a good step in the right direction as I believe the students took well to the presentation.

For my Green Fleeters, I typically talk about what is upcoming. For RWB Optis, we have Sunshine States the 4-5 of March and then Spring Fling in early April. If you have not signed up, I am sure your regular RWB staff would appreciate your early registrations as it allows us to plan more accurately for our regatta logistics.

It was a pleasure working with everyone this weekend and I look forward to getting to know all of our students better in the future!

Coach Alex