Race Sessions with Phil Williams - #2

Phil Williams has been running a bunch of race workshops at Evans Bay going over things like rules, tactics, starts etc. for the club members. I went to the first one which went over NOR vs SI and prep before you go on the water. This one was all about race prep, starting sequences, getting the best out of a bad start, and trasit lanes.

Race prep

Phil talked us through what he does to prep his yacht from get down to dock/shed and to the start line. Something that I took away is the decisions that he makes when tacking up and down to the top mark to check for shifts and which side of the course is best. I’m generally pretty bad when it comes to getting on the water early but hopefully I’ll be able to change that! Here’s a draft of what I’ll probably end up trying to do on race day.

Starting sequences

I kinda already know how this worked, sometimes I forget the flags for recall/postpone vs cancel but this was all straight forward.

Getting the best out of a bad start

I’m not very good at starting. This is proably going to become very relevant when I actually start racing Mr Jinks. The key to getting a good start is getting a clean lane of nice undisturbed air, which means that you need to protect your spot on the line and get on it as early as possible so noone else can grab it.

The main takeaway is to just cut your losses and act quickly to get the freshest air you can.

If you start a bit late and underneath someone in dirty air, the best thing to do is just tack under them, and under the rest of the fleet or until you find a new clean lane. This is because it is better to just try and get out as fast as possible and try to make gains elsewhere. I also found out that the disturbed air coming off a sail has actually had its angle changed a little, meaning that you can actually point a little higher from the disturbed wind. It makes sense and is pretty clever

Transit lines

In previous sessions with Phil we have gone over transit lines before so I had a pretty good understanding of what they are. Simply put, a transit is an object on shore that is in line with the two ends of the start line. This is useful because it is very hard to judge whether you are over the line or not so you can line up either then pin or committee boat end with the transit point, and if the object is behind the start line then you are not on or over the line, but if it is above the line, then you are over the line.

One note that I took out of it is the idea of line sag in larger fleets. People closer to the middle of the line will often sag back because they can never quite see their transit nor the end of the line. If you can figure out the fact that there is line sag then you can use this to your advantage.

I’ve learnt a good few things from Phil’s sessions, annoyed I got the flu for the last one though so I couldn’t go :(

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