First training weekend of the season

Last weekend was the first of a 5 weekends course on yacht racing that I’m teaching for Orza Scuola Vela on their Archambault 40. The idea is to bring sailors which are almost entirely new to regattas, up to speed with each other and ready to race in the winter series in La Spezia.

The course had its first edition last year, and it had been both good and bad for a variety of reasons. As a starter, we were the slowest boat in the ORC-A category, giving us basically no chance to have real duels with other boats. While the boat is light and fast, it did not have a competitive jib so we were loosing ground on every beat upwind, quickly finding ourselves competing on our own. Only in a couple of occasions we were able to have proper duels with a Grand Soleil 43. On the plus side, the team made large improvements throughout the course, making less and less mistakes as we progressed, and overall being very good at starting and at sailing downwind.

It seems that we are now on the right heading to improve on last year’s achievements. Thanks to a sponsor found by Mauro, one of the team members, we now have a new light wind Genoa and we will soon have a new J1, to improve our beating angles. Furthermore, we have swapped the carbon bowsprit with a steel one: this has added weight on the bow, but allows us to compete in the slower category. Of course this will be a less competitive setting, but I think that racing within the fleet will be a big improvement on the quality of the course, as it will now include also some notions of strategy and tactics, which I mostly skipped last year.

This weekend I focused on getting to know my new crew, and on getting them to know the boat and the roles onboard. They are 6 and they come from a variety of different sailing backgrounds. As much as I would like them to get specialized in one or two roles, at the moment I am rotating them a lot, in order to see how they behave and how they cooperate with each other. Also, as most of them have never been on a competitive boat, they still need to understand what each role entails; I’m sure that whoever will be the helmsman will do a better job knowing what his mates up on the bow are up to when getting ready for a gennaker drop.

Next weekend I want to train mark roundings and I am setting up a little training session with two other boats: we need to get a feel of our strengths and weaknesses before getting on the actual race course! Racing will start on the 22nd of February, and we still have quite a lot to cover in order to be ready. Nevertheless I really like this mid-duration courses, as they allow me to have a slightly more complex plan, and to see some actual results.