Recovery Plan

A bad start is, well, a bad start but it doesn’t have to be the end of your race. Jon Emmett coaches you back to the head of the fleet

- Jon Emmett

The first thing we have to say is prevention is definitely better than cure. That is, it is better to be good at avoiding a poor start than being good at recovering from one! That said, every sailor gets a poor start from time to time, so both knowing how to mitigate the chances of a poor start and how to recover from one is very important. You can deliberately practice recovering from a poor start when training by one boat having to start 30 seconds late and try and pull through the fleet.

Practice makes perfect and doing a warm-up regatta can be an excellent way to practice starting before a major event and at international events, coaches are increasingly putting on “Coaches’ regattas” before World Championships, etc to give their sailors starting practice at the venue before the main event (and perhaps get those black flags starts out of the way before the real thing).

You don’t need a coach to practice starting, just get a group of friends together: it doesn’t take long if you use two or three minute sequences rather than the usual five. A good little routine is to do a few practices starts before every club race because this will greatly increase the number of starts you do in a year.

What causes a poor start?