MR1: Mr Aggressive

The yacht club has traditionally organised a year long Match Racing regatta, which involved two boats on a Saturday morning, and some pretty fierce competition. However, with the purchase of six (!) brand new J80s and forming a match racing "class association", this year promises to be something special - no hanging around for the two boats to finish a one sided race, the chance to finish a regatta in a weekend, and a boat that is a little less tender to sail in a breeze.

To find crews for the extra boats, we had a training session last weekend aimed at beginner match racers, with a pre-seminar, drills on the water, racing, and excitingly a video debrief. I've put a team together for the season (I've been pretty excited for a while!) and jumped at the chance to try it out. Having never helmed in a match race before, it was a little nerve wracking but ultimately great fun. It turned out that having a team racing/small boat background was a great help - I seemed to adapt better to the large rudders and small turning circle of the boats, and perhaps had a bit of an advantage in the situations during the prestart. Still, we had some good racing, and managed to win every race apart from against the Singapore national team, who were in Hong Kong practicing! Not too much shame in that...

I learnt a huge amount match racing - the rules are the easy bit, it's the execution of them that matters much more.

• It's all situations, situations, situations - you must know going into a manouvre  how you are going to come out, and what you hope to gain from it. 
• Once you know what a situation should involve, execution is even more difficult. For instance, the dialup (which I'd assumed was just a simple head to wind move) involves a large amount of skill in judging your speed going into it, so that your position relative to the other boat allows you to hold them where you want them/get out of a port side trap.
• Time on distance - if you don't know how far away you are from the line, the final approach is near on impossible.
• Speed. If you've got it, even a bad start can be overcome and you can get back in touch - it gets you out of a lot of trouble! Luckily, I had an excellent main trimmer, and could rely on him to get the boat going fast upwind.
• On the short courses we do, there has to be something really special going on the left side of the beat to make it worthwhile to go for the pin. It's close to impossible to make up enough distance to cross the starboard tack boat at the top mark!
• I need to tell my crew what I'm up to prestart...

The race against the Singaporeans was a fantastic challenge. While I didn't cover myself in glory (penalty on entry for port/starboard, over the line at the start, and passed on the way to the finish line) there were a few glimmers of what is possible against challenging opposition! I managed to escape from a controlled position in the prestart and chose to lead back to the start, and also managed to gain enough on the first beat to almost cross at the top mark - probably helped by being over.

The other exciting bit was the video debrief - there is nothing like having a cameraman on the back of your boat, watching your team's every move and recording every conversation, and then having it replayed and your mistakes analysed in front of everybody afterwards! Luckily, I didn't swear/shout at my crew/fall out of the boat, but I did get a reputation as "Mr Aggressive" for the day - always chasing penalties!

Hopefully, the video should make it onto the internet pretty soon, and the season should have quite a good media presence if the sponsorship deal comes off...

Anyway, must get back to some bedtime reading with the Call Book.