Why do we sail?
I do wonder about this sometimes.
Every so often, on meeting someone new, or maybe chatting to someone I don’t know very well, the topic of sailing comes up. And when I mention that I sail I am often met with a comment like:
“Oh, sailing. I’d love to try that sometime. It looks so relaxing.”
And I try (I really, really try) to say nothing. To just agree and move on.
But I can’t. Continue reading
A few weeks ago* I read this article on why people quit sailing. Essentially the author had quit racing because the same people were winning all the time, and he felt that he was just there to make up the numbers – to give the others someone to beat. Continue reading
Club Boats help new members to get on the water quickly and easily
The other day I posted a piece on how giving away free membership could help retain young sailors, and Tillerman wrote a comment that raised a number of questions that run alongside that idea. One of the questions he asked was:
Are you in favor of yacht clubs providing a fleet of club-owned dinghies to attract new young members who know how to sail but can’t afford to buy a boat? Continue reading
There are three types of dinghy sailor in the world:
People from category number one are relatively rare. If you know one, you should treasure them. Feed them their favourite type of alcohol. Laugh at their jokes. Tell them the colour of their wetsuit really brings out their eyes. Whatever it takes, look after them because sooner or later you are going to need them. Continue reading
Sailing clubs and yacht clubs aren’t (or at least, shouldn’t be) about making money. They aren’t businesses in the normal sense, in that their primary focus should be about providing for their members, not achieving a profit.
They are about building long memberships with valued members. So how can they go about achieving this? Continue reading
The Great Retention Problem: Where do all these young sailors go?
There’s lots of debate and opinion around at the moment concerning participation in sailing, the 20-35 gap, and the ageing demographic that our sport seems to have. There are lots of ideas around, many of them good, and I’m going to post a few thoughts on this area over the next few weeks. But for now, I want to look at finding out what is happening to cause this problem. Continue reading
Earlier this week I reposted an old piece I wrote on why people don’t protest each other in club racing, and why we need to work towards getting more protests (or at least more arbitration) in our regular sailing.
Of course, there’s no such problem for the elite professionals. They just have on-the-water judges or TV judges to make decisions in real time.
But even that doesn’t work out perfectly for all concerned.
If you Continue reading
Sometimes when I am sailing in an open event I’ll check to see if anyone with an older boat than mine has beaten me.
Mostly when I haven’t done as well as I’d hoped.
It can be comforting to look at the results and secretly think to myself that if I had a newer boat like the guys that finished above me then I might have done a little better.
I was chatting to my father-in-law, who isn’t a sailor (and can’t really understand why anybody sails) and he asked me how old my boat is. And as I was answering, I got to thinking about Trigger’s broom: Continue reading
A couple of incidents when I was racing last year got me thinking about our attitude to enforcing the rules when sailing.
It was a light wind race, force 1 to 2 and after a so-so start I was approaching the windward mark in third.
I tacked for the windward mark right on the layline, with the guy ahead of me coming across on port and clearing me by one to two boatlengths. He went past me and tacked right on my wind, giving me a problem – I was now in bad air meaning my approach to the windward mark would be slow, and my pointing was affected by him too (because of the bad air) so I may not quite lay the mark. Continue reading
This is one of the first posts I created, and it focuses on mental rehearsal – still a much under-used technique for improving your sailing (and much, much more).
In a study that has become quite well known since it was published, psychologist Alan Richardson showed that visualisation (or mental rehearsal as it is more commonly referred to now, as it is thought that using all the senses produces better results) can improve performance nearly as well as physical practice. Briefly, the study was as follows:
Three groups of basketball players were tested to see how much they could improve their free throws
The third group didn’t improve at all. However, the group that was practising for 20 minutes each day improved 24%, whilst the group using visualisation improved 23% – almost as much as the guys actually physically practising. This was revolutionary stuff, and we now hear elite athletes talking about visualisation quite regularly as part of their preparation for big events.
So what does it mean for lesser mortals, and particularly beginner sailors, club sailors and open circuit sailors? Continue reading
