Big Fleets and Small Fleets

So here it is. Number One in Walker's Words of Wisdom on Wednesdays as translated, interpreted and otherwise confused by Tillerman...

One of the early chapters in Stuart Walker's book Positioning: The Logic of Sailboat Racing is Big Fleets and Small Fleets in which he discusses the difference in approach that a racing sailor should take when racing in large and small fleets. It's not something I think about consciously very much when racing in different fleets so let's see what he says...

But before summarizing his advice let's understand what Walker sees as inherently different about these two race situations...

• Small fleet racing often takes place near the shore, or in rivers or bays with strong currents.
  
  
• In small fleets, typically club racing, there are usually only a few races. In a large fleet, a major regatta perhaps, there will be many races.
  
  
• In a small fleet, one place one point may determine the outcome of the regatta. In a large fleet one point means very little.
  

Hmmm. I could argue with some of that but I guess in general it's true. So what does all that mean for racing strategy?

Walker's main advice is that in big fleets you should be conservative and in small fleets be daring. Why is that I wonder and what are the implications for strategy around the course?

Take the start for example. In a big fleet, getting clear air is what matters. The ends of the line will be crowded and carry all kinds of risks. So make a conservative start away from the crowds, away from the ends, find some clear air and sail fast.

On the other hand in a small fleet, clear air means little because most boats will have clear air. So start at the end near the advantaged side of the course and avoid getting blocked by the opposition from getting there first.

Similar argument for the beat. Walker argues that in big fleets rarely is one side of the course obviously advantaged, nor is the wind oscillating so you can play the shifts. (I guess he is assuming here that a big fleet will be racing in open water away from any effects of land or variable currents that would create those conditions.) So he says that in big fleets, you should "play the fleet". This means you should avoid the laylines, keep inside and to windward on the tack away from the rhumb line, ahead and to leeward on the tack back, dig back in towards the rhumb line when you have an opportunity. (There's at least one chapter in this book about why all these moves make sense.)

Whereas in small fleets on a short course often one side is advantaged (assuming you are near the shore I suppose) so get over there first.

On the reaches he says that in a big fleet you should avoid luffing matches and work for clear air, to leeward if necessary. Whereas in small fleets you need to go as high as necessary to protect a lead from an attacker; that one point may win the regatta.

In other words, in a big fleet go for a "good" finish. Consistency usually wins the regatta. In a small fleet go for the win every race.

Walker has another interesting point about the difference between small and big fleets. In a big fleet someone will "have it right" and be sailing fast. In a small fleet everyone may be slow and nobody even knows it. So if you want to improve your boat speed you need to race in big fleets.

So what do you think? Does that make sense? Is that how you race in big and small fleets? Any other tips for how too handle the different scenarios?

The Doctor

Stuart Walker is a brilliant sailor. Soling World Champion. First American to win the International 14's Prince of Wales trophy. He is also a prolific sailing author. I own many of his books.

I have read these books. Cover to cover. Several times. However, I have remembered very little of what I have read.

They are not an easy read. Dr Walker is a brilliant sailor but his writing style is often...how shall I say it kindly... turgid. He uses words, like turgid, that most of us don't used in everyday speech. He sometimes writes long sentences. He uses long words and technical language that he assumes we all know. You have to work quite hard to extract the essential message from every paragraph.

Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of good stuff in his books. I dare say that if I could absorb everything he is trying to tell me I would be a far better sailor.

So I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to translate a chapter from one of Dr Walker's books into a blog post. Paraphrase it into more simple language so that I can understand the basic message... and maybe remember it. Perhaps others may read the post and learn something too.

In fact I think I'm going to do this exercise about once a week. It will be a series. Let's see... Andrew Campbell already has Monday Morning Tactician. Joe Rouse has the much-imitated Fish on Fridays. So my new series will be Walker's Words of Wisdom on Wednesdays.

First instalment tomorrow on Big Fleets and Small Fleets.

Sailing's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries

Forget the Mary Celeste and Baron de Rosnay. There are any number of plausible explanations for those nautical mysteries.

There are greater unsolved sailing mysteries for which science has no explanation whatsoever. I wrote about one yesterday. How can an inanimate piece of line like a Laser mainsheet tie itself into knots with no human intervention?

Logical Litoralis rose to the challenge and wrote a post on his blog on the Science of Knots. Sorry kiddo I'm not convinced.

Apparently a couple of scientists from the University of California (where else?) spent many months and oodles of grant dollars dropping pieces of string into boxes and shaking them around. Surprise, surprise, the string got tangled! I know that. The mystery is how this happens, not whether it does.

One of these two scientific geniuses from la-la-land apparently built a computer program to simulate string bouncing around inside a box and once again, shock, horror, the virtual string tied itself in virtual knots. So what? There is a computer program called Tacticat in which I have proven conclusively that if I make a squirrel start and bang the right hand corner I will win 42.3% of all sailing races. Somehow my percentage in the real world is somewhat lower.

You can tell how far this programmer dude is divorced from reality by this quote from him in a Live Science article. “It is virtually impossible to distinguish different knots just by looking at them.” I rest my case.

Here are two more huge unsolved sailing mysteries that have stumped the world's smartest scientists...

The Great Clevis Pin and Cotter Ring Mystery

This is a clevis pin

These are cotter rings

The cotter rings are used to secure clevis pins. One end of the ring is inserted in the pin hole and then the ring is rotated until the other end of the ring is through the hole.

It should be secure. But it ain't.

For example, the ring in the pin securing the deck block for the outhaul line on my Laser, somehow managed to unwind itself and magically disappear while the boat was sitting on its trailer in my garage for two weeks while I was in Spain. Science would say that this is physically impossible. But it happened.

Then there is the Great Gatorade Bottle Mystery

This is a bottle of Gatorade

Yesterday before going sailing I put a bottle of Gatorade in my sailing bag, zipped it up and placed the bag in my car. It was never out of my sight. But when I reached the launch area the bottle of Gatorade had disappeared. After a (thirsty) afternoon's sailing I drove home and discovered that the bottle of Gatorade had teleported itself out of the bag and out of the car, projected itself across several miles of open water, and landed right side up on the kitchen counter at my house.

Explain that you Californian scientists, I challenge you.

Why Practice?

Why practice? Practice sailing. Or any other skill for that matter?

That's a stupid question. You practice to improve your skills.

Really? Is it as simple as that? I can think of at least seven different reasons to practice. And surely if you know the reason you are practicing on any given day it might make your practice more effective, don't you think?

1. To learn a new skill. You've never trapezed before. You want to learn. You may need a coach to explain the key aspects of the new skill and the things to avoid.

2. To unlearn an old habit that's wrong. You've always tacked a Laser facing backwards and you only just realized after twenty years that you should face forwards? It's hard to break old habits. You're probably going to get slower before you get faster.

3. To refine an existing skill. Your gybes are pretty good but not perfect. You need to smooth off the rough edges. Improve your timing. Concentrate on the key issue of speed coming out of the gybe.

4. To improve straight line boatspeed. It's magic, the more time you spend in the boat the faster you become. Persuade someone to tow your trailer from launch site to landing site and sail twenty miles downwind in waves. The magic will work for you.

5. To discover what you're doing wrong. You're always getting your feet tangled in the sheet when sailing your Laser upwind. Well, go out and sail upwind and concentrate on what your feet are doing. Are you looping your feet under the pile of sheet in the cockpit when you tack? Are you lazy about keeping the sheet tidy? You'll never find the time to discover all this during a race.

6. To work on your sailing fitness. You could run. You could bike. You could lift weights. You could watch TV while working out on your hiking bench. But nothing will improve your sailing fitness like a couple of hours on the water.

7. For fun. Hey, you do this sailing stuff because you enjoy it, right? So if you have a few free hours what could be more fun than to take your Laser down to the water and go for a blast? Hey, you might even learn something.

I went out for a practice on the bay this afternoon. Beautiful late fall day. Sunny, warm, few wisps of cloud. Around 10-12 knots with waves just big enough to surf.

Did a bit of #4 and some #5 and certainly #6. But mainly #7. Magic!

Why do you practice?

I Can Tie Knots With My Feet

Tillerwoman and I were having dinner one evening in Spain with one of the other sailors at the Laser Masters Worlds and his wife. The other sailor started telling Tillerwoman this long story about how good he was at tying knots with his feet. As his wife (also a sailor) and I listened and smiled he kept my darling wife rapt with the tale of how he is able to tie knots in his mainsheet with his feet while sailing up the beat so that when he reaches the windward mark there are so many knots in the sheet that it won't go through the ratchet block and he is unable to bear away.

Of course he was kidding. There's no need to tie knots with your feet. The gazillion meters of Laser mainsheet, sloshing around in the bottom of the cockpit in all that water from every nth wave coming over the bow, is quite capable of tying knots in itself without any human intervention. How does it do that? I mean, when I used to teach little kids in sailing classes how to tie knots it took them ages to master the art of tying knots that wouldn't come undone when you pull both ends of the rope. But a Laser mainsheet, supposedly an inanimate object, has the skills to tie itself into knots that can take almost half of a downwind leg for a knotmaster like myself to undo. It's a mystery.

But wait. Every problem is just an opportunity for some marketing guy to pitch a product that will solve the problem. I think Steve Cockerill was the first to sell a "non-tangle" Laser mainsheet. We all bought one. Ha ha. What fools we were. OK, I guess the Rooster mainsheet has a lower knot-tying intelligence than the sheets we used to use before it came along. But it quickly learned to tie itself into knots just like its predecessors. Ho hum.

The latest in anti-tangle knot-free technology is the Bzzz mainsheet from New England Ropes. I think the guys at New England Ropes may have discovered a line with an even lower knot-tying IQ than the Rooster line. But it's still pretty smart and can occasionally manage a double underhand truckers triple hitch without any help from my feet.

There must be a solution. Isn't there some way to dump the sheet in the cockpit when you sheet in so that it won't get tangled? Some Laser sailors like to keep all the sheet at the front of the cockpit. Others are back-endians. It's as pointless a distinction as that between the big-endians and little-endians in Gulliver's Travels, whose major political issue was whether soft-boiled eggs should be opened on the big side or the little side. I've tried both. The sheet wins every time.

So what am I to do? Is there a solution to this problem? Or is it like other unsolvable mysteries such as which came first the chicken or the egg or how does Donald Trump's hair stay in place? I surely hope not.

Help please.

Blogger's Disclaimer

I came across A Blogger's Disclaimer via Team Gherkin (which by the way has a marvellous post today about A Glorious Sunday of Laser sailing in the Spring).

I was struck by one paragraph in the disclaimer...

If someone writes about you and you don't appreciate it, approach them about it. Try to remain calm and polite. Explain that you are entitled to your privacy as well. There are many compromises that can be reached from using vague nicknames to protect your anonymity, or not mentioning you at all. If you are upset because they are writing negative things about you, be reasonable, try to see if there is a way to resolve the issues and mend your relationship with the writer. If that doesn't seem to be possible, stop going to the website. They will eventually get bored and move on.

I try very hard to protect the privacy of people with whom I sail. Sometimes I will use nicknames such as Alphonse, Bertie and Cedric to refer to other sailors or even something as vague as that guy. If the other person has a sailing blog too I may link to that or refer to the name they use on the blog. Sometimes as in the post on Cheating I even write about other people's behavior in the first person so that nobody will think I am pointing fingers at them.

I hope I don't ever cross the line and invade your privacy. I value the relationships I have with other sailors and I would hate to think that fellow sailors may be upset by this blog or are even avoiding me because they think I might embarrass them by writing something here about them. So please follow the advice in the disclaimer and let me know if I do cross the line. We can work it out, I am sure.

Fish on Fridays

Back in the day, before Al Gore and I invented the Interwebs, before AccuWeather and Weather Underground, before SailFlow and iwindsurf, before 24-hour cable TV and The Weather Channel, back in the old country, Blighty, Albion, this sceptred isle, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, this precious stone set in the silver sea, this blessed plot...

What? Where was I? Where am I?

Oh yes. Back in the good old days, a.k.a the 70's in England, the best source of weather forecasts was BBC television. And the most memorable face of BBC Weather in those days was the man who went on to become the longest serving weather presenter on British television, Michael Fish (photo above). No -- that's not a photo of me.

Fish who is now retired will be remembered above all for two things...

1. His dress sense. He has won accolades as both the best and worst dressed man on television. You be the judge.


"They were looking for someone young, handsome and well dressed," Michael Fish recalls of his move to the BBC in 1974. While others presented the weather in staid suits the young pretender wasn't shy of suede, wide collars or plaid.

2. The botched forecast for the Great Storm of 1987.


On 15 October 1987, he said during a forecast: "Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way... well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't!". That evening, the worst storm since 1703 hit South East England causing record damage and killing 19 people. Oops!

Anyway, what has all this to do with sailing? Well, as I was saying, back in the day the best way for dinghy sailors to find the weather forecast prior to a weekend of thrashing around the nearest gravel pit was to tune in on Friday evening to our friend Michael's weather forecast on BBC TV.

And that is how that certain famous expression entered the sailing vernacular, the phrase which continues to be a regular feature of the work of sailing uber-bloggers Edward and Joe, the tag that to this day continues to be synonymous with excellence in weekend weather forecasting... Fish on Fridays.

Cheating

"So is there much cheating going on here?" Tillerwoman stunned me with this question one evening over dinner while we were in Roses for the Laser Masters Worlds.

Cheating? Perish the thought. Of course not. Cheating just doesn't happen at this level of sailing. At least that was my initial reaction.

Cheating? What's cheating? To act dishonestly. To deceive. To deprive by fraud. That's what the dictionary says.

Cheating? In the sailing context the word conjures up such nefarious acts as sabotaging a competitor's boat (by stealing the drain plug just before he sets sail perhaps) or paying a coach to gather wind information from up the course and transmitting it to a secret radio receiver hidden behind your ear. No. I'm as certain as I can be that such stuff doesn't go on at any level of Laser sailing. At least I've never seen it.

But then I started thinking. Well, yes maybe there is a gray area. I guess it all depends on your definition of cheating.

Another dictionary definition of cheating is to violate a rule of a game deliberately. The Laser class rules define cheating as, "doing something that you know is illegal."

Hmmm. Rules. What rules must we follow when we are racing? There are the Racing Rules of Sailing of course. And the Laser Class Rules, which mainly define what you can and cannot do to change your boat and equipment. Also the Notice of Race, and Sailing Instructions have rules that you must follow.

So if I deliberately break any of those rules, I am cheating. Or am I?

What about some of the following hypothetical examples? Are any of these cheating?

• I am at the favored end of a crowded start line. A boat comes into a gap to leeward of me that is just big enough to squeeze through. She luffs slightly,I try to respond but there is another boat close to windward of me. There is slight contact between me and the boat to leeward. Nobody protests. We both start the race and sail on as if nothing has happened.
  
  
• The sailing instructions say that the regatta will be sailed under Laser class rules but I use a "practice sail" that is made by a sailmaker who is not approved by the Laser class.
  
  
• The end of my boom just brushes the windward mark as I am bearing away. Nobody else sees it. I don't do a 360.
  
  
• The Laser class rules say that the inhaul shockcord must be attached to the outhaul cleat on the boom but I tie it to the mainsheet bain. What the hell difference does it make?
  
  
• The sailing instructions say that all sailors must wear PFDs that are US Coast Guard Approved but I use a British PFD (not USCG approved) because it's small and slim and it's easier to squeeze under the boom when I am are tacking.

I'm sure you can think of other examples. Would you ever do any of the above? What would you think if you were to see me breaking some of these rules? Am I cheating? Does it make a difference if I think I am not gaining an advantage by breaking a rule? Would you turn a blind eye? Would you call me on it?

If I Had A Boat

If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
I said me upon my pony on my boat

Three Keys

OK. Enough of the woolly philosophizing about whether I was sailing faster or got lucky at the Worlds or whether it's all about winning or not. Time to get real and work out what it was that I did differently this year, what went well and what didn't, and what I need to do next.

So why did I do better in 2007 than I did at the 2003 Worlds?

Well, of course, anyone's current sailing performance is a product of everything they've done and so the answer is everywhere in this blog. But if I had to pick out three things that I think made the most difference they would be these...

1. Cabarete. The clinic in the Dominican Republic in January, and especially the experience of racing there in the Caribbean Midwinters after the clinic, gave me experience of sailing in waves that was like nothing else I had done before. I heard several of the other mid-fleet sailors in Roses complaining about how unstable they felt sailing downwind in the waves on the first couple of days of the Masters Worlds. I had to chuckle. Anyone who survived the Fifth Caribbean Midwinters will never fear waves again.



2. Focus on the Laser. For many years I have raced Sunfish and Lasers. Sunfish were the dominant class in inland New Jersey. If you wanted large fleets of top-class competition in a single-handed class they were the game. Of all the days I spent racing, probably almost half were in Sunfish.

At the end of the summer of 2006 I sold my Sunfish, and since then have concentrated purely on Laser sailing. I'm sure it's made a difference. Funnily enough Focus was almost the first thing I wrote about on this blog. Took me a while to take my own medicine.

3. Moving to Rhode Island. When I lived in New Jersey most of my sailing was on inland lakes with the occasional foray to the shore for some bay sailing. Since moving to Rhode Island in May, I have spent the whole summer sailing regattas and practising on the sea. Lake sailing is not the same. I'm sure that the past few months of sailing in waves and chop, instead of the flat water of those lakes, have made me much faster in those conditions.

Geeze Tillerman, that's not exactly brain surgery. You're saying that the way to improve your sailing is to sail a lot in the boat in which you plan to race, in similar conditions to the regatta that you want to do well in? You expect people to read this crap?

No.