One of the stories I’ve been editing for the July/August issue of Sailing World is Part II of a series on sailing downwind in light air by America’s Cup veteran Tony Rey (warning: small plug coming—the first part is in our June issue, which should be on newstands soon). I’ve read the story four or five times and spent countless hours dissecting Tony’s advice and trying to make it as clear as possible. I can recite the key points from memory.
Of course, when put into a position to use this information, I totally screwed up.
The first race was a disaster. We got squeezed out at the boat end, and then managed to screw up virtually every key decision the rest of the way. The second race didn’t start much better as, when the starting gun fired, we were two boatlengths off the line and going slow. But then the night started to turn for us, we took a conservative path up the beat, playing the shifts, and crawled back into the race. Learning from our mistake in the first race, we played the Newport side of the run and jumped into the top half and the other side ran out of wind. We would finish ninth, dead in the middle of the 17-boat fleet, but we had a chance to finish as high as seventh. I woke up this morning thinking about those two places.
One of Tony’s tenets for a light air run is to be wary of coming into the mark on layline as it makes it very easy for other boats to jibe on to your air. It’s best to jibe a little shy of the layline and give yourself some flexibility toward the end of the run.
My first mistake was ignoring this advice and hitting the port-tack layline for the leeward mark two-thirds of the way down the run. This wasn’t an easy call. USA 3360 banged the corner on that run and went from behind us at the windward mark to sixth at the finish. But my decision to hit the layline would hurt us.
As we converged on the mark, it became clear that we were going to be very close with My Heine.
My initial thought was to sail low—we were coming in on a hotter angle and had better speed—and try to get to the mark first. This was my second mistake. In those conditions, sailing through a windshadow is all but impossible. Another of Tony’s key bits of advice for light air is about always keeping your air clear.
Realizing this wasn’t going to happen, we then made the decision to fight for the overlap. We won the battle, getting the inside overlap, but lost the war. We rounded slow and with My Heine planted on our leebow. We had to tack away and eventually lost one more boat at the finish. Ugh.
A third nugget of advice that Tony offered in his story is the singular importance of a clean rounding, with speed, even if it means going to the unfavored side of the gate. We had neither. I often chide myself for not being aggressive enough when approaching leeward marks—especially single marks as opposed to gates. But this time, once we realized we would not get through My Heine’s windshadow, we should have focused on a clean rounding, with speed, right on their transom. This might have enabled us to live on their windward hip. There was so little port tack in the final beat that we didn’t need to stay there long to ensure we could beat them to the tack and have a chance to beat them across the line.
It seems so easy in hindsight.
It was great to see 18 boats out last night. Let’s hope for some breeze next week. We are definitely due. Enjoy the long weekend.
Last night's results can be found on the Ida Lewis webpage.
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