Ace Your Club Race

Quirky courses and mixed fleets - Mark Rushall talks tactics and sorts strategy for club race situations

- Mark Rushall

One design fleets, committee boat starts, upwind starts, port hand roundings… in most racing books and articles these are a given. But for many, our regular racing is in a mixed fleet, offa fixed-line, around pre-laid courses, at our local club venue...

THE CHALLENGES

Time pressures: If I want to sail a club race and get to the allotment on the same day, I’m not going to spend hours before the start doing practice beats, split tacks, to come up with the perfect first-leg strategy. I’m unlikely to find time to download a synoptic weather chart and use it to plan for likely changes, weather cues, thermal effects and so on. But in the minutes I have before the start, I do need a way to come up with some strategic priorities on which to base my decisions at the start and around the course; without these priorities I’ll be forced into reactive decisionmaking and unlikely to take advantage of big gains that may be out there.

Your competitors: How often have you looked at the results of a club handicap race to find you’ve finished within seconds of a boat you were barely aware of in the heat of the race? The faster boat relentlessly pulling away in clear wind, with nothing to worry about other than her strategy, or the slow boat, hanging on just behind the melee, keeping out of trouble but learning everything from the boats ahead.