And now, watching the 2024 Louis Vuitton Cup, Mr Wilson is turning up on our screens trying to sound nonchalant whilst the British boat is actually showing some speed:

Of course, I’m sure everyone remembers that around 8 years ago I briefly mentioned Rob Wilson in a post about the Optimist Selection Trials of 1989.

I’m sorry, what?

You don’t remember that?

Come on guys, pay attention.

Robert sailed at Littleton Sailing Club – a small lake club less than ten miles from the gravel pit that I learned to sail on. For that reason, I raced against him quite a bit over my Optimist years, and I got to admire the back of his boat from a range of angles and distances over that time.

I first heard of him when he was just 11 or 12. He won the prestigious Datchet Open – which was the end of season regatta and, to my mind anyway, a sort of unofficial Inland Championships.

It was a remarkable win for one so young, and it must have annoyed the hell out of quite a few 15-year-olds hoping for some last bit of Optimist glory.

Robert would go on to win a lot of Open meetings over the years I raced Optimists, but one in particular sticks in my mind – The Bowmoor Open of 1990.

I don’t remember much about the first race (other than calling “Starboard” on someone whilst I was on Port when I was in 3rd place and having to do a 720 – oh boy…), but according to the report in OP:NEWS (the Optimist magazine at the time) Rob won the first race, taking the lead at the last leeward mark.

The second race is described as follows:

Just after the start of the second race a major wind-shift left much of the fleet immediately out of contention. Andrew Simpson (yes, that Andrew Simpson) led to the first mark where he was overtaken by Richard Martin and Damian Lord (that would be me); that new order held to the finish with Martin winning from Lord and Simpson.

What the race report doesn’t mention is that Richard and I were clubmates, and for every beat for the remainder of the race Richard covered me so tightly I barely had enough air to breathe, let alone sail. I’m amazed I held on to second place. He was a super sailor (and would probably have beaten me by more if he’d ignored me altogether), but it was his first Open Meeting race win and he was determined not to lose first place – and rightly so.

All this meant that there were a lot of potential overall winners going in to the last race. The wind dropped from a gentle Force 2 to even lighter, and even as the fleet went onto the last beat it was still anyone’s regatta. Rob Wilson gained the lead at this late stage and looked set to win the Open when, out of the blue, he capsized. My memory is that he messed up a roll tack, although the race report he was “caught out by a 90 wind-shift”. It was quite probably a bit of both.

Anyone who has sailed Optimists (or had kids who have sailed Optimists; or indeed who have ever seen an Optimist…) will know that capsizing is a bit of a nightmare. Unlike self-draining modern boats, the Optimist is a bathtub without a plughole, and the only way to empty it is to bail it out.

For most people this would be race over, at least in terms of finishing first.

Not for Rob Wilson.

Somehow (and to this day I have no idea how) he managed to bail the boat out and win the race.

It was an impressive performance, if slightly annoying for the rest of us (although the fact that I finished 3rd overall, through a complete fluke of results (I had a 2nd and a 6th to count), meant that I wasn’t overly upset by the whole thing).

So it seems that Rob Wilson has a bit of experience coming back from a seemingly impossible situations – something that must have come in useful as a coach for the INEOS team over the years.

Who’d have thought that some America’s Cup level resilience could be forged in the light airs of an Optimist Open meeting at a small lake in England?

Not me, anyway.

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This, of course, means that I am in a tiny minority of humankind. Even my son, who will watch pretty much any sport, can rarely be persuaded to sit and watch with me. And my wife and daughter? No chance.

There is good reason for this. Sailing is a terrible sport to watch.

Really, really bad.

Unless conditions are near-perfect, and a lot of time and money has gone in to setting up the production (with loads of cameras, and fancy special effect overlays to show laylines and distances to marks), and you have some understanding of the sport, it is nearly impossible to get engaged with sailing as a spectator sport, especially if you are not a die-hard fan.

But we keep trying. This year we had the Olympics (about which I will write more in another article or two), and the America’s Cup, and the Vendee Globe. And of course there is SailGP, now heading in to season number five, with several events each season.

They have all had a go at making sailing watchable, with varying degrees of success/failure.

The guys tasked with selling sailing as a viewing event must have one of the most difficult jobs in production.

And what about the commentators? God love them. At least sailing boats look great most of the time, so the camera guys have something to work with.

But the commentators have to fill time while the wind picks up. Or drops off. Or stops shifting around. Or until the race management re-sets the course. Or the lightening passes over. Or maybe there is a general recall and the whole starting sequence has to be done again.

And even if there is racing, they have to talk about what is happening when it is almost impossible to actually know what is happening. The gridlines to the marks are often not perfect. and nor are the laylines.

It is impossible to see where the best pressure is. It is impossible to know what shifts are happening. It is impossible to know the effect that the current is having across the racecourse.

And, most of all, if it is fleet racing, it can be impossible to follow everything that is going on across the fleet.

And, all the while, in the back of the commentator’s head, is the awareness that there are a bunch of keyboard warriors – myself included – who will criticise every little thing they do, from the mistakes they make to the sound of their voice; from the fact that they speak over the sailing comms to the fact that they haven’t spoken enough and all we can hear is the sailing comms.

In short, it is an impossible job.

But.

Of course, there had to be a “but”.

As SailGP and the America’s Cup both tend to pitch themselves as Formula 1 on water, perhaps we might learn a little from that sport.

(I told you my son will watch virtually any sport, and this means I end up watching virtually every sport).

In F1 commentary they tend to have a main commentator who is like a super-fan – he gets excited by everything (even the Monaco Grand Prix!), and he seems to have an endless supply of facts and figures about all drivers, teams, and tracks.

Beside the main commentator is an expert – an ex-driver that knows the detail of the sport. He can describe what it is like to drive these cars, what specific challenges are presented by each individual corner on a track. He knows what the thought processes are for the drivers and their strategists, and why they might make some of the decisions they make.

And alongside this they have other analysts that look at specific footage, and who offer insights into specific incidents or moments – again, generally ex-drivers.

Compare these two clips – watch each for 30 seconds:

First is the start of the Monza Grand Prix –

Other than one driver running wide and having to rejoin, virtually nothing of note happens in the first 30 seconds – no position changes among the leaders and no crashes. and yet the commentary is so engaging that you are drawn in to share the excitement.

The second is the start of Race 17 of the LV cup, where the two pace setters from the first few races face off in challenging conditions:

So much happens!

Luna Rossa look for the hook, and New Zealand defend, momentarily looking in the controlling position. But suddenly Luna Rossa accelerate and look to roll over the top of New Zealand.

There’s several seconds where it could go either way – will the Kiwis be able to luff the Italians over the line, or will Luna Ross get clear ahead and win the start? They just manage it, and even the unflappable Peter Burling is shaken into compounding the error by attempting a down-speed tack and dropping off the foil.

All this happens with the Italian boat hitting nearly 48 knots (90 kmh / 55mph). In a 75 ft boat. That weighs 6200 kg (nearly 7 of your American tons).

We’re told all the time how vital the start is in these match races, and it is the only time that we are guaranteed to see the boats engage in close combat, but the commentary just allows the moment to pass.

Sure, it is good to watch anyway but, if you are new to watching sailing, you need someone to show you where the excitement is. The F1 commentator barely takes a breath, which is in stark contrast to the sailing commentary where they barely say a word.

I know it sounds like I am having a go at the current commentators. I’m not – I think they’re great. But it needs at least one of them to be passionate and excited about everything that is happening. We have the experts (Glenn Ashby is particularly good), but we don’t seem to have the main commentator yet.

I was on the edge of my seat watching that start, but if you were watching for the first time you would not have known that anything exciting was happening at all.

It reminded me of this classic video. It gives a good idea as to what sailing looks like to someone that doesn’t have a clue about the sport, and it is well worth a watch if you have 3 minutes. be warned there is some NSFW vocab, but it does make me laugh every time:

I’m sure all this stuff will get better and better the more sailing is shown on TV, and kudos to everyone that steps up to do it. It takes a lot of courage to work live – I know I couldn’t do it.

And for those of you that think no amount of commentary can make it interesting, then have a watch of this video – proof that you can make anything exciting if you know exactly what you are doing:

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I came across the photo because, with the Olympic Classes racing at Weymouth this week in the last World Cup meeting before Rio 2016, I was reminded that I needed to complete a job that I should have finished some time ago.

Last year I wrote some notes of on the Optimist Selection Trials of 1988, and I intended to follow up with notes on 1989. But I never did.

So I decided to get them done, and came cross the photo.

The photo I posted is on the left, and the Europeans team is on the right.

Incredibly, the 1989 video is even more boring than the 1988 one – at least in ’88 it was windy and wavy. This is the full video, but (unless you are particularly masochistic) I don’t recommend that you watch it all the way through. However, like the 1988 video, there are some interesting facts about it which I’ve listed below:

• The most interesting fact about this video is that there are four future Olympic Gold Medallists in it.
  – Ben Ainslie (sailing K-3359) finished 3rd overall, and qualified for the Worlds team. Here he is (aged 12) rounding a leeward mark (time stamp 2 hrs 17 mins 26 secs);
  – Iain Percy (K-3282) qualified for the Europeans by finishing in 10th. This is a clip of him leading (time stamp 7 mins 17 secs) the first race.
  – Sarah Webb (K-2575) was also racing – here she is rounding the leeward mark (time stamp 1 hr 26 mins 53 secs)in her best race that year.
  – Andrew “Bart” Simpson (K-3354) finished just outside European qualification in 13th. Here he is rounding the top mark in race 4 in second (time stamp 1 hr 20 mins 10 secs).
  A friend of mine who was also at the event (he came second, and won three of the races) reckons that Chris Draper and Nick Rogers might have been racing as well, which would mean that there were a grand total of 15 future Olympic medals in the fleet. Unfortunately, according to my research, they didn’t sail in this event, meaning there were only 9 future Golds, and 3 future Silvers.
• Although you could say there was one more Gold. Robert Wilson also qualified for the Worlds team, and I believe he went on to coach the Helena Lucas to a Paralympic Gold medal in the 2.4m class. I think Rob now works on the Landrover BAR America’s Cup team as a coach. Here he is sailing K-3126 and rounding a windward mark in 1st place in the first race.
  For any catamaran sailors, he’s also written some very good articles on Tacking and Gybing a Cat, and on Tuning an Asymmetric. And here’s a nice video of him sailing a Formula 18:

• None of these future Olympic medallists won the event, though. Jon Gorrod won the seven race series by an impressive 24.7 points, despite winning just one race. He finished in the top 6 in every race, whilst every other sailor had at least two double-digit results. Goes to show that then, like now, consistency counts.
• With all the controversy over Olympic team selection this year, it is also interesting to note that this isn’t a new issue. As you can see from this video, the whole 1989 Optimist selection series was sailed in light winds, but the Worlds that year were sailed in very windy conditions. The team struggled with the 25+ knot breezes, and when the wind dropped on the final day they showed what might have been, recording a 4th, 5th, 13th, 31st and 45th.
  The same issue had occured the previous year, with the selection trials sailed in heavy winds, and the worlds sailed in relatively light breezes. In 1991 the format was changed and the trials were sailed over 3 events in an attempt to mitigate against the problem repeating itself a third time.

I suppose I should mention my own performance. Once again, as with so much of my life, my parents need to take a long, hard look at themselves. The only reason I didn’t qualify for a team in ’89 was because they failed me: had I been born a girl then I could well have been heading to the Europeans that year. As it was, they decided to have a boy, and so I didn’t get anywhere near the boys team, finishing 32nd. Here I am rounding a windward mark in around 10th place – it was about as good as it got for me that week:

First published 7th June 2016

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I was looking for some info last week and I came across this photo (apologies for the quality), and I wondered if any of my readers would be able to figure out who any of the guys in the photo are. So…

1. Can you name any of these happy young chaps?
2. Do you know where the photo was taken?
3. Or when it was taken?
4. Why is it relevant this coming week (from Wednesday onwards)?
5. Why might it have been even more relevant on May 7th and 8th?
6. Who was the handsomest guy sailing at the regatta?

This post was originally published on 5th June 2016

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In fact, it isn’t that thrilling even if you were there and knew the participants. Nevertheless, in the spirit of Throwback Thursday, I thought I’d mention a few things about it that some might find interesting.

• It was windy. If you don’t believe me, have a look at the gybe mark here (time stamp 41 mins 46 secs). Wait for third and fourth to go round – I think we’ve all had gybe mark roundings like these. As a kid it was good to see the leaders struggling with these things too.
• The week before the event (or possibly after – I can’t remember for sure) the 470 Olympic Selection Trials took place. They had very little wind for the event, and were pretty annoyed that us Optimists got all the breeze the following week. For the 470 trials Nigel Buckley and Pete Newlands were hot favourites to get selected (they won the 1988 World Championships and the Pre-Olympic event), but Jason Belben and Andy Hemmings won the trials and went to Seoul.
• On one of the days the RNLI had a helicopter (time stamp 49 mins 25 secs) and lifeboat (time stamp 46 mins 58 secs) in the area because it was so wild. I don’t think they were there just to save me, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
• There were some massive jellyfish (time stamp 36 mins 15 secs) on the course. If memory serves, one of the sailors took a chunk out of their daggerboard when they sailed into one at full pelt.
• The last day they sailed Race 6 after Race 7 (no, I don’t know why), and a certain Iain Percy won it. As far as I know it was his first major championship race win, although he’s racked up a few more since then. It starts here (time stamp 1 hr 20 mins 34 secs).
• Percy’s future Star Olympic Gold and Silver Medallist, the late Andrew Simpson, was also there. We were used to seeing him rounding marks just ahead of Iain Percy because they sailed in the Star together, but this time (time stamp 44 mins 36 secs) he rounds just ahead but in a separate boat. And here he is (time stamp 25 mins 42 secs) taking off on a reach.
• There are two people on commentary, but I’m afraid I only know the name of one of them – Jim Saltonstall. Jim was the national coach for Optimists at the time, and is credited with being one of the main catalysts for British sailing’s performance at later Olympic games. He was certainly an excellent coach. Disappointingly, I don’t think he mentions “ferrets” – he used to say quick sailors were like ferrets up a drainpipe. He also used to talk about rounding the windward mark “up amongst the chocolates”.

I’m going to be honest, I was pretty reluctant to mention my own performance in this event. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll get away without talking about it – my family and friends wouldn’t let it pass. Let me start by pointing out that I was 12 at the time, and also that I had never sailed in conditions like this before.

Ok, excuses over.

• You can spot me quite easily because my sail had a blue panel across the middle. This would have made it easy for the Race Committee to spot me over the line had I been anywhere near the line at any of the starts. But I wasn’t. I made a conscious decision to avoid the melee at the committee boat end because, with all the wind and waves, I would almost certainly have put a hole in someone else’s boat. Despite being very line shy, and avoiding the crowd, I still managed to get a couple of starts that weren’t completely horrible, like this one (time stamp 1 hr 43 mins 10 secs) in the last race we sailed.
• My friends and family used to enjoy watching this moment (time stamp 54 mins 25 secs) a lot. My boat was called Out of Africa, and they would delight in the fact that the only time I was mentioned by Jim Saltonstall in the entire commentary was to be described as “almost out to lunch”. Not my finest moment…
• …and yet not my worst. I was fortunate that the really bad bits of this windward mark rounding (time stamp 1 hr 4 mins 20 secs) weren’t quite caught on camera. What actually happened was that I rounded the top mark and tried to bear off. But I couldn’t actually manage it, and instead I go flying off the right of the picture. Off screen the boat tacks on me (not my decision) and a few seconds later I reappear on port. I go into an out-of-control gybe and nearly broach (again).At this point I remember looking at the leeward mark, about a mile downwind of me, and thinking about the prospect of sailing a run in this manner, and then having to slog my way upwind again. And I decided that, in the interests of living until I was 13, I would head for home.

I finished in the mid-40s out of 60 boats, which was neither a disaster nor an achievement. But I did learn a lot. One of the main things I learned was that it is worth finishing every race, especially in breezy conditions. So many boats retire, either through gear failure or because they look at the leeward mark a mile away, having broached twice in quick succession, and decide to head for home. Just finishing almost guarantees a half decent result.

Oh, and I did get better, I promise.

First published 12th Feb 2015

The post TBT: Some Notes on the Optimist Selection Trials 1988 Video appeared first on THE FINAL BEAT.

When I did my first major championship, the Optimist Selection Trials in Weymouth in 1988, as a happy accident the event was recorded. My brother and I must have watched the video tens of times, and we knew the little bits of commentary off by heart. It’s sad, I know, but we loved it.

At the time there was no YouTube, and if the sailing got any TV coverage at all it was 2 or 3 minutes of Olympics sailing every 4 years (and even that wasn’t a given if Britain wasn’t doing well). So any video footage was extremely valuable.

My favourite bit of the whole video was probably this leeward mark rounding by K-2640, sailed by Andrew Collenette:

I like it because it looks good – the boat seems to accelerate through the turn; there’s no clumsiness of movement; you don’t even notice the sail coming in, it’s just in the right place the whole time, and when the rounding is completed the tell-tales are flying perfectly.

It’s just very…well…satisfying.

Of course, my obsession with good leeward mark roundings means that I practice them more than almost anything else. If I’ve got 10 minutes before a race I’ll probably find a buoy and round it, practising getting the upwind settings on quickly and accurately, focusing on the nice wide entry, working on my hand-over-hand sheeting, using some leeward heel to make the turn, and hiking the boat flat on the exit.

All this practice means that I am pretty good at leeward mark roundings. Not amazing, but pretty good. Good enough.

The problem, though, is that I shouldn’t be practising them as much as I do. It’s good to practice anything, but really I should be practising the things I’m less good at, like holding position on the line. It’s not that I can’t do it, just that I can’t do it well enough, or, more importantly, consistently enough.

There are two quotes that always make me feel guilty about how I use my practice time. The first is from my old favourite, Eric Twiname:

“…you tend to like and enjoy what you are best at, and as you give more thought and practice to these things you are most likely to improve them. By working instead at what you like least and are worst at, you get a … balanced approach (to your training)”

What Eric is trying to tell me is that I need to spend more time practising holding position on the line. The problem is that I find it so frustrating. I line up next to a buoy, and then spend the next few minutes hopping about the boat, pushing the tiller this way and pulling it that way, backing the sail and then trying to avoid the boom, nearly getting stuck in irons and inadvertently going backwards, and all the while the buoy gets further away, bobbing around peacefully whilst all this manic energy is being expended in an attempt not to move.

I just don’t enjoy it. It’s not very, you know, satisfying.

The other quote is:

“Don’t practice till you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong”

I can’t say I’ve done that with my leeward mark roundings, but I do know I haven’t done it with a lot of other skills. When I do make a concerted effort to improve my holding position technique it does become easier, but I never practice enough that it feels natural. I must practice it more.

And, for those of you that feel about leeward mark roundings the way I feel about holding position practice, I say this:

Give it another go. When you get good at it it feels great.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

First published on 10th Feb 2015

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The first is to remember a dry towel. I’m about 95% successful at this, which makes me sound like a towel-remembering genius. But let me tell you, the 5% of the time I forget can be pretty costly.

I almost always remember to pack one of these

The other thing I always think about before I go sailing is this:

“The desire to sail well often results in winning; The desire to win rarely results in sailing well”

Dr Stuart Walker said that, and he knows a thing or two about winning sailboat races.

Anyway, the quote came to mind when I was re-reading some bits of John Bertrand’s wonderful book, Born To Win (I’ve reviewed it here, if you’re interested), which I pulled out when I was writing my (silly) post on Australian sailing. Talking about his early years as a sailor he says this:

“The pursuit of excellence has always driven me. We (John and his crew, Geoff Augustine) did not do it for domination but to achieve sailing perfection.”

 When I was younger I would almost always turn up at regattas thinking one of two things:

1. That I probably wasn’t in with a shout of winning (if lots of top sailors were there); or
2. If the competition wasn’t all hot-shots, that I had a pretty good chance of doing well

The problem with this is obvious. On one hand, if I thought I wasn’t in with a shout of doing well then the chances were that I wouldn’t do well. On the other hand, if I thought I had a chance to win (or at least come very close) then I would put too much emphasis on the result, and not enough on just sailing well. This would often result in my not doing as well as I should have.

It’s not that I didn’t want to sail well – of course I did. The problem was that my focus was on the result, not on the process.

Of course, thinking in the way Stuart Walker suggests does improve results. But more importantly, it edges the emphasis away from results and more onto performance, allowing you to feel good coming off the water regardless of where you finished. In other words, you might come last because of one big mistake, but still come off the water feeling good because you did everything else right. Or, conversely, you might sail really well, but someone else sails even better – no matter, you’ll still feel great, even though you were beaten.

It is surprising, when you are conscious of this idea, how often you hear athletes from all sports talk about how they have focused on the processes in training or in competition.

In a way, it relates to a post I wrote called Would George Clooney Improve His Sailing Quicker Than You?. Both ideas avoid focus on the result, and instead on performing the small things well.

Interestingly, John Bertrand describes at the beginning of his book the start of the fifth race in the 1983 America’s Cup. Australia II is 3-1 down in a best of 7 series – this race is do or die. Lose and the Australians are going home. And what happens at the start of the race? The Australians are over the line and have to re-start.

There are many reasons why they might have been over at the start, but one could be that they were too focused on the result. They had to win, so the result may have become the focus. If that is the case, then it is comforting to know that even the great sailors focus on the wrong things sometimes.

That said, I bet he didn’t forget his towel.

Originally published October 2014

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There are two types of thinking that we do: focused and diffuse thinking. Focused thinking is the kind of thinking you do when you are concentrating on something specific – doing a maths problem, working on a crossword, or reading a complex text. Diffuse thinking is the big-picture, making-connections, general kind of thinking.

We tend to use diffuse thinking when we are doing something that doesn’t require concentration – like jogging, or washing up, or even sleeping, and it is great for getting a handle on something that we have been struggling with. We’ve all, for instance, experienced being stuck doing a crossword, and then being interrupted by our flipping wonderful children. When we return to our crossword we suddenly get the word we were struggling with quite quickly; or we’ve been working on a complex topic, go out for a walk, and when we come back we seem to have a clearer idea as to how it all fits together.

The funny thing about focused and diffuse thinking is that we can’t do both types of thinking at the same time. we’re either one or the other, but never both. A lot of leading scientists working in the field now reckon we should work on something for around 25 minutes, and then take a five minute break before continuing, to incorporate both types of thinking. They also recommend working on a problem until frustration begins to kick in, and then doing something completely different, to allow diffuse thinking to kick in and do some of the work moving us forward.

So much, so unsurprising. A lot of us know these things already to a greater or lesser degree. Also not particularly surprising is that some of the geniuses from human history have developed ways to enhance this to do amazing things.

Salvador Dali is said to have sat in a chair, with a key on a string hanging from his fingers, and relax, drifting off to sleep whilst loosely thinking about a piece he was working on. When he dozed off the key would fall from his fingers, clanging on the floor and waking him. He would then get up and immediately work, using his dream-like thoughts to develop his art. Given his paintings, this is hardly surprising.

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More surprising is that Thomas Edison used a very similar technique. He used ball-bearings rather than keys, but other than that he did pretty much as Dali did, using the technique to help move on through difficult problems, or to get creative ideas. Einstein and Aristotle are also said to have used the technique.

Very interesting stuff.

But what does it have to do with sailing?

One of the things that this research showed up was that even those of us that don’t have time to loll around in chairs fondling ball-bearings can still use diffuse thinking to help with specific things. The idea is that we focus on something that we want to improve just before we go to bed, and then tell ourselves that we want to dream about the topic. This has been shown to produce significant improvements in various activities, from solving problems to physical ability.

So, in theory, by watching a video of a top sailor just before bed, and then deciding to dream about it, our bodies can develop better technique for sailing.

Which does sound a little unbelievable.

But…our bodies are controlled by our brains. By allowing the brain to look at a great example of how to sail our particular class of boat, and then letting it loose on the image with diffuse thinking, it is able to create new neural pathways that weren’t there before. We’re allowing our subconscious to understand how to sail better, and as most of the boat-handling manoeuvres are best done without thinking about them, this is crucial to sailing well.

You could also use it to help work through complex tactical problems, technical issues, and so on.

Or you could use it for something useful like a problem at work.

Or you could just go to sleep like a normal person. But then you’re a sailor, so you already have a track record of doing ridiculous things.

I have no idea if this technique works, but, if nothing else, it’s a good excuse to watch sailing videos.

If you’re interested in reading more about the technique you can find Dali’s book here, and there’s an interesting piece on how to achieve lucid dreaming here.

Originally published October 2014

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For the day of the first races it was blowing a solid force 4, with a decent if not huge swell. I love sailing in these conditions, but I get better results in lighter breezes. So when I rounded the windward mark in seventh I was pretty happy, and when I gained a spot on the downwind I was even happier. Sixth place and gaining – this frostbiting thing was easy.

The breeze was building a little, so I ramped on the vang for the second beat. The first shift came in, and I tacked onto port. And my buoyancy aid got caught on the boom, and… I capsized.

I got the boat upright and got going again having lost a handful of spots. Then, a couple of tacks later, my buoyancy aid got caught on the boom, and…I capsized.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHhhh!

I finished the race 14^th, knackered, cold and frustrated.

The most annoying thing about all this was that it gave me a problem in heavy winds. I wanted to hammer the kicker on to depower, but I couldn’t afford two capsizes every beat. Never mind where I came in the races, my ego simply couldn’t handle it.

My results suffered as a result. In force 3 and under I always finished in the top 5. In force 4 and upwards I didn’t get a single top 5 result, and most were in the early to mid-teens.

The next summer I got the opportunity to attend a couple of training sessions with the guy that had won the second of the two frostbite series I’d competed in, and he was particularly quick in a breeze. He was watching us tacking, and made a suggestion to me. He told me to slide my bum back about a foot as I turned into the tack. I already put my back foot across the boat before the tack (so that it hooks under the toestrap as I come onto the new tack), but sliding back had one big benefit. It meant that as I crossed the boat I could push the old back foot into the back leeward corner of the new tack and push myself across and, crucially, forward onto the new tack. This meant that my head and body passed through the biggest gap possible, allowing me to put more vang on upwind.

It was a real light-bulb moment for me. Others among you would have thought of it, no doubt – many probably did, or just did this naturally. But, for two reasons, it think it would have taken me a long time to figure this out (if, indeed, I ever would have figured it out):

1. I’m not exactly a genius
2. I grew up sailing Optimists.

The square back of an Optimist means that the more you dig the back corners into the water the quicker you stop the boat. This means that when you tack, you tend to keep your feet reasonably well forward. It was so ingrained in me that sliding back means slowing down, I suspect I may never have really tried it if it hadn’t been suggested to me by a good sailor.

All of which goes to show that, firstly, getting coaching can really help unlock a problem very quickly (especially if you know specifically what you need help with); and, secondly, that you should always revisit your assumptions and analyse the things that you think you know – they may not always stand up.

Oh, and thirdly, if anyone is likely to park their bum in the wrong place then it is me.

First published October 2014

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If you’re thinking about doing a Frostbite or Winter sailing series this year, and my poetry has failed to convince you (although this does seem unlikely), then perhaps Malcolm Gladwell might have more luck.

In his book Outliers, Gladwell describes how children of all backgrounds learn and improve at approximately the same rate during school term time. However, children from more disadvantaged backgrounds fall behind during the holidays – particularly the summer holidays – a phenomenon known as the “summer learning loss”.

The idea is that, where families with money and opportunity help their children to continue their learning and maintain their knowledge through things like museum visits, cultural holidays, access to a range of educational books and material, families without money (or, to some extent time, if they are having to work multiple jobs to keep their heads above water) are not able to provide this stimulating environment and so their children fall behind.

Like pretty much any study or claim these days, there are some that question these findings but, regardless of the rights and wrongs, it is probably fair to say that those that continue learning gain significantly on those that don’t.

And the same applies to sailing:

Those that sail competitively through the winter improve; those that don’t, don’t.

I saw this first-hand when I sailed a competitive frostbite series in Dublin. Not only does your racing continue to sharpen, especially as you’re racing against guys you don’t normally compete with in your own club, but things like your sailing fitness improve too.

It also helps with other things. Getting out of your comfort zone, and dealing with creating new routines for yourself, all help you to figure out what helps you perform well and what hinders you.

And sailing in cold, windy, wavy conditions certainly make those breezy summer days feel a lot easier.

So, if you want to get a headstart on the fleet for next season, then Frostbiting or Winter racing is the way to go.

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Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell

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