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
Hello again.
Sorry it has been so long. The website has had some major issues. Things have been, in modern sporting vernacular, sub-optimal.
In fact, if this website were a leeward mark rounding, it would have looked a little like this clip (well worth a click if you haven’t seen it before – but maybe turn your volume down – the commentary is kind of loud):
But all these technical issues are behind us now (I hope).
My entire IT department (which comprises of my dad – who, at his age, should be relaxing in front of an open fire in slippers and smoking a pipe) has sorted everything out and I’m trying my very best to not break it again.
As I put everything back together I will upload the pages – this is already happening on a daily basis. For this reason, you might click on a link you want to view and find there is nothing there. All it means is that that particular page is not ready just yet, but you can check back in a week or two and it should be there.
If there is something you want to see urgently then comment below, or contact me via Twitter or Facebook and I will try to bring it to the top of the list for you. You can also email me on damian (at) thefinalbeat dot com.
You can keep up-to-date with all the new additions (including brand new posts and pages) by signing up to the email newsletter. It goes out around once a month, and lists all the latest bits on the site.
I feel it is important to state very early in this review that I consider Wind Strategy to be a Very Important Book for sailors.
The reason I feel the need to state this is because I know what I am about to write, and it may come across that I actually think otherwise. So, in order to be clear on the matter, let me state it again:
Wind Strategy is a Very Important Book.
Wind Strategy by Houghton and Campbell – A Very Important Book
I know this for three reasons. Continue reading
You’ll be sorry to hear that this last month has been rather difficult for me. The reason for this difficulty is that, until this month, I had been sure of three things in my life. And one by one, these certainties have been stripped away.
The first certainty was Continue reading
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