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 first group would practice free throws for 20 minutes a day
The second group would only visualise themselves making free throws
The third group was not allowed to practice or use visualisation
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.
How can normal sailors use mental rehearsal?
So what does it mean for lesser mortals, and particularly beginner sailors, club sailors and open circuit sailors? Continue reading →
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
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.
I received an advanced copy of Golden Lily by Lijia Xu in the post a couple of months ago – I suppose because I reviewed a couple of Fernhurst’s books late last year. It came as a very welcome surprise, and I immediately dropped the book I was reading, and got stuck in.
I intended to post a review straight away, but I had difficulty writing it. You see, Golden Lily is an unusual autobiography, and it has taken a while to get my thoughts straight on the book. Continue reading →
And not even books with pictures – books with just words!
Reading this blog, I can understand that you find that hard to believe. But there it is, it’s a fact.
People that know me know that I like to read books. They’ll often buy, lend or recommend books to me – almost always literary tomes to make me think. Which is good for two reasons:
Sometimes it works, and I do actually think about things
It makes me look good when I read them in public
However, I’m not above admitting that I like a good old page-turning thriller. And a month or so ago my wife took a break from buying me obscure South American literature (which she really buys so that she can read them and then moan at me that I never read the books that she buys me) and she bought me a thriller. It was called I Am Pilgrim. Continue reading →
United States
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