Practice Techniques

Great thread, Tad. Glad you got it started.

Mary is correct about getting the drill book. Most of the Olympic coaches use it as I understand.., both monohull and multihull.
It is basically a collection of drills that have been used over many years of sail training.., plus a bunch I dreamed up.

There are a number of things I have done in the past for training.
For example, I find some sort of mark, or use my own and start doing donuts around it -- do a good enter wide, exit close mark rounding, sail a number of boat lengths, tack, bear off, jibe and round the mark again. Do it over and over and close the circle as you continue on.

Warning: Bad thing to do is to practice wrong maneuvers. In a previous post folks are practicing tacks every 20 seconds, which is fine. However, if you are practicing doing tacks with a bad technique, you are simply developing a bad habit that will be very hard to break.
A way to correct this problem is to somehow get someone to video tape your boat handling. You will be amazed at how bad you do.
For example, on a roll tack you should start the turn with steadily increasing pressure on the helm as you move to the aft windward stern of the boat, realease the mainsheet just as the wind goes throught the eye of the wind, stay there until the boat is on a close-reach heading, then swap sheet and tiller and move forward to ooch the boat out of the turn.
You may think you are doing this perfectly.., and then you will look at the videeo and see you:
1. Jammed the rudder over and made a brake instead of a turn
2. You went to the back of the boat first, thereby slowing it down before the turn
3. You forgot to let the mainsheet off and recleat it
4. You rushed to the other side halfway through the turn
5. etc., etc., etc.,
I recall taking a tennis lesson. I thought I had the best serve around.., nice toss, legs bent, toss hand up, racket up, slight pause and whipping of the racket.
Then I saw the video.., aaaagggghhhh ! I looked like a Keystone Kop.

By the way.., a commercial here. You can find the book Sailing Drills at http://store.catsailor.com/tek9.asp?pg=products&specific=jqcmjmrpm

Comments on some previous posts.
Time on the boat is a must. I have seen folks come to a major regatta and do well just because they sail a lot, even without others around.
In fact, I have probably won more races this year than any time in my years of sailing.., simply because we have a fleet of Waves that race twice a week and get in 4 or 5 races each outing. We sailed 55 races this summer just in our local fleet. With all that time on the boat, I managed to win every major event this year that I sailed in.

On Head out of the boat. One of my favorite drill in the book is the

Eyes Close Drill.

All you are doing is taking away one of your senses. You still have four more.., and some of you rare folks might still have five. <img src=

alt=

/>
You can feel the wind on your cheek and your hair, feel how the boat is taking the waves, if you are trapped you know you flying a hull because there is more pressure on your feet, or perhaps the other way around, your head is under water.
All this is to develop a feel for the boat. You should be able to keep the boat at max speed without constantly staring at telltales.
If you ever watched Randy Smyth sail you would never have seen so much

rubber-necking

<img src=

alt=

/>
You must get your head out of the boat.
A little war story. Mary and were invited to a regatta as

Guest Sailors

and they were to arrange for a new Hobie 20 (when they first came out). That did not pan out and I had to sail with a guy on his new boat.
I was intrigued by the new toy and was really involved with all the strings, etc. We took a 6th out of about 25 boats. The next race I felt more comfortable with the boat and decided to ignore all the strings and just sail.., or get my head out of the boat -- watch the other boats for shifts, puffs and the like. We won.
The next day the guy left and I was put on a Nacra 5.8. Never sailed one, but had a 6.0. However, with a boomless rig you absolutely need a positive mast rotator upwind and downwind. He did not have it.
I was so bummed and focused on how ugly the mast and sail looked that we got a 5th. Next race, I talked myself into ignoring all that and got my head out of the boat and sailed by the seat of my pants. We won.
That taught me a big lesson.

How to improve: I tell my graduating classes each time (in my Rick White Sailing Seminars www.sailingseminars.com) that they should work on their weaknesses.
Most folks practice their strengths. You will find a guy that is good at upwind sailing usually working hard on that same thing all the time, ignoring his weaknesses.
I know my strength over the many years is my downwind sailing ability. I have worked hard on going upwind and now I find it one of my strengths. And my downwind ability has not suffered.., except in a Wave where I should lose 30 lbs and get faster.
My suggestion: write down all your weakness.., perhaps as many as ten of them.
Then, go back and prioritize them from weakest to less weak.
Go out and work on one thing at a time.., don't try to work on all of them. Soon that weakness will become a strength. If so, scratch it off your list and work on item two.
When you get done with your list, start over.

Mental Sailing: There was a nice post about imagizing. This is a great and strong thing to do. I use images while I do self hypnosis. There are many books on self hypnosis and all work on the idea of totally relaxing your body. Once there you can project images of great starts, great tack, picking out shifts, great mark roundings, and awesome finishes. It is like running a video of your doing a perfect race.
If you make a mistake in your image, hit the rewind button and start at the point just before the mistake and play again.., this time getting it right.
As Yogi would say,

Sailing is 90% mental -- the other half is physical.

At any rate.., great thread.
Rick

Not having the time for practice, and going racing instead is fair enough. But in my opinion and experience you also need to dedicate some time for pure training on the boat aside from the disturbances of racing. There are so many different things to work on, and while racing you might e.g. get to do 3 spi sets and douses, that is not nearly enough to optimize how to do it. Even if you concentrate on doing the tacks in a special way and working on those, you _will_ be distracted by the fact that you are racing.
It's the same thing with every sport I have done. You need to practice the basics if you want to be really good, and sailing is a very technical/composite sport where you need to be on top of both the physical side of it (movements, timing, balance, endurance, strength, agility etc.) and the mental side.

Now, when I was boxing, I did not start out in the ring. But worked on the basic movements, guards, blocks, taps and punches. When I mastered this, I could move on and do some controlled sparring before I was able to go into a match. Sailing is not directly comparable to boxing, but it's a good analogy as you will get murdered on the racecourse if you go out there without practice.
You will of course get better/faster just by racing. But my point was, and is, that you will be doing it the really hard way and you will probably never reach your true potential.

While I still agree that practice outside of racing is certainly a bonus. Tacking 50+ times up a creek while trying to overtake a boat just ahead is great practice - and you know pretty quickly if that tack was faster than the last (I'm talking about the Key Largo Steeplechase).

Now that you mention it, my tacking has gotten a little inconsistant and I had a couple of times at Tradewinds where it took a few seconds to get the boat going again (probably sheeted in too quickly). It probably is time for some drills.

Here is my two cents worth.
1. Take Rick’s course down in Key Largo like my wife and I did. During the seminar, you will practice drills in a crowd with sailors of vastly different skill levels. This has got to make you a better sailor. I assume that is why Kathy Kulkoski and Barb and Chip Short have repeatedly taken the seminar.
2. Then, buy the drill book. What I plan on doing this spring is practicing the drills Rick showed us while trying to visualize the drill as taught during the seminar class. I looked in the book last night and found myself saying; “Hey I remember that drill, that’s the one where we capsized on the first day”. Rick is correct about visualization; it really helps as long is it is coupled with a real life example that is not fraught with errors. Rick, the only thing I try not to visualize is that first day where boats were going over routinely due to the high winds (that was not fun).

There is another reason to take the seminar—you will make some great friends. Being thrust into a situation where you live together, sail together, eat together, and drink beer together can only build some close ties. Very few of you know who the heck I am and that will likely remain that way since the University keeps my wife and I pretty busy. However, it is the opinion of this novice sailor that many of you will improve by taking the course and develop some great memories (plus new friends). It is also interesting watching the videos each day of your sailing technique.

This is not a paid endorsement if you were wondering. I hope to take the course again in a few years.

Cheers
Bob
Hobie Wave
Inter 18 until someone buys it

Bob:

Way to say it. Come down and sail with us sometime. www.tcdyc.com. Register and join the forum. Great group of people. Six are going to Statue of Liberty race in NY in July. We are going to have some series races and drills from Ricks book. With marks setup on the weekends. Talked about it at fleet meeting tonight.

Good Sailing,

Doug Snell
Hobie17

It's a little late for this, and sorry if somebody already said it, but if you want to do 200 tacks and 200 gybes, it will take 200 figure of eights, not 50. If you do them on beam to beam, it will take 100 to do 200 tacks, and another 100 to do 200 gybes. If you do them upwind/ downwind, you will do 1 tack and 1 gybe per eight, it will take 200 again....

I agree 100% - The best thing any of us can do is to get to the stage of sailing the boat fast automatically. Thats not to say totally ignor what is happening around you but work on the basics.

Michael

To paraphrase Chevy Chase in Caddy Shack, "See the wind, feel the wind, be the wind. Nuu nuu nuu nuu nuuuuuu. Moo moo moo moo mooooooo."

That's why our seminars are organized the way they are:

The first day is devoted to boat-handling drills, the second day to starts, the third day to mark roundings, the fourth day to tactics and wind shifts. The fifth day makes you put all the components together in our version of team racing.

Boat-handling always has to be the initial building block, in order to benefit from the rest of the seminar.

I should add that I don't think it is a matter of which comes first -- boat-handling skills or understanding of the wind. They are inextricably bound together.

You cannot learn how to sail in the first place until you know where the wind is coming from. And you can't learn boat-handling skills, and do a proper tack and proper jibe, or park your boat, or point properly to windward unless you know where the wind is coming from.

The biggest problem some of our seminar students have (and it is immediately evident on that first day of boat-handling skills) is that even if they have been sailing for a couple of years, they do not really know where the wind is coming from. And they don't know that they don't know. Once they better understand the wind, then they can start to perfect boat-handling skills.

That's why I said earlier in this thread that it is a chicken-and-egg situation.

Throughout your sailing life you never stop studying the wind and the water, whether you are sailing a fast beach cat or a big, slow monohull.

I was just pointing out that study of wind and water is something that you can always practice when you are out sailing without other boats around, which I think was the question that started this thread.

It's not matter of first or last or instead of. You do it every time you are on the water -- you can even do it when you are anchored out on a little fishing boat.

I would recommend to anyone. New or Old to get Catamaran Racing for the 90's (sailing since 79 and get something new in head everytime I read it. I gave dog eared one to grand daugher and got a new copy. Also get and use the Drills Book. We are going to use it this season to practice, plus going to set a small course up ever weekend. As anyone will tell you about anything repetitive (band, saling, singing, football etc). PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE, nothing beats time on the boat.

Doug Snell
Hobie 17

You're right, in that each beam-on figure 8 will take two tack OR two jibes. However, sailing windward/leeward, each 8 will take two tacks AND two jibes. See attachment.

OK, my bad, I stand corrected and thanks for pointing it out. I was trying to make 200 a less daunting number.

I've learned from coaches that making practice first mandatory (every time out) for students is necessary for improvement. Coaches cant be on the water whenever the sailing opportunity arises for a student and quality practice can easily be ignored for "fun" sailing. It is amazing how little time and increasing efficiency will be used to accomplish a required practice task to begin the fun that much sooner.