FD UK TRAINING - DECEMBER 2000

Most of us don't have what it takes to go on the water training in January and February, especially in North Wales, how can we work now to improve performance during next season? Obviously, sort the boat, buy the sails, and remember that personal fitness is vitally important to grind your way through the second of two force five back to back races at sea, so shape up and get fit, but here are a couple of things to do at home.

1. LEARN THE DANCE STEPS.

Piece of paper, divide it longways into three columns for time, helm, and crew, and break down all the boat handling jobs to their most basic steps. Have your partner do the same independently, then sit in the pub, compare them and work out how you can improve the speed and efficiency of tacks (light and breezy), hoists and drops, gybes (runny and reachy) etc, so you both know who does what and in what order. Try doing this for driving the car round a roundabout as a practice, and see just how complicated something most of us do every day really is. Ideal traffic jam / train journey / AGM of Welsh Yachting Association game too.

Example, windward mark rounding starts at least 50m out, with crew finding the wing mark and telling helm, helm deciding on strategy for the reach, whether or not you can hoist, and approximately how broad it will be, and the windward rounding finishes, several pages later, with the helm doing the minor genoa sheet trim after the kite is filling, and praising the crew for doing all her bits really well.

Once you have each technique sorted you can go out and do it, even on yer own, until, like driving round the roundabout, you do it without thinking.

2. FEED YOUR HEAD.

Christmas is coming, how about some of these for the stocking, as well as the stockings themselves. It is said that some can sail well and some can write well, but very few can do both, these are some I believe can combine the two. No apologies for the esoteric mixture, or the fact that some of them will only be found in the public library or the second hand bookshop by the quay in Lymington or Maldon.

Frank Bethwaite - High Performance Sailing, 1996. Describes FD sailing as just about making it into high performance, very detailed breakdown and rationalisation of everything you need to go fast, in the right direction, lots of lovely 18ft skiff photos.

Eric Twiname - Sail Race and Win, 1982. One paragraph on jib sheet position, several chapters on brain position, later editions revised by Cathy Foster. Excellent.

Robin Steavenson - When Dinghies Delight, 1955, Marks to Starboard, 1958. And you thought dinghy racing was something modern, how about getting the timber released to build a boat, forging applications for extra petrol rations to go to the Nationals, definite ‘in front of the fire with a large glass’ stuff.

Stuart Walker - Techniques of Small Boat Racing, 1960, Tactics Of Small Boat Racing, 1966, very readable, dated in places, but full of good strategy and tactics stuff to think about.

Mark Chisnell / John Hodgart - Dinghy Systems, 1988? Lovely book full of the secret vices of FD sailors, overflowing with blocks and string, cleats and fittings, nothing about sailing at all, but it is the most modern book on putting together and sharpening the weapon.

Jim Saltonstall - RYA race training manual, 1996? If its good enough to be the basis for five Olympic medals, it will do something for all of us mortals, whatever we manage to take from it.

John Merricks and Ian Walker - High Performance Racing 1996? People who know what they are doing. Stuff for both conventional and asymmetric dinghies.

Garry Hoyt - Go For The Gold, 1971. Very thought provoking and very funny, some of it historical now, but like Twiname, concentrating mainly on the most important part of the boat, the nut on the tiller.

Robert Mundle - Fatal Storm, 1999. The story of the Sydney - Hobart race. Journalistic, but eyewitness accounts and photos are very very scary indeed.

John Maesfield - The Bird Of Dawning, 1933. Classic ‘ripping yarn’. Swash your buckle with shipwreck, fire, insanity - just like FD sailing - and a neck and neck race between two tea clippers up the English Channel as the finale. And for the semi literate, yes, he did write ‘The lonely sea and the sky’.

Fernhurst Books ‘Sail To Win’ series. Anything from this publisher is worth reading, the ten or so books in this series, each covering a particular aspect of racing are especially so.

Eric Twiname - The Rules Book, 2000. Dont know yet if this will exist, but it gives one of the best explanations of the RRS. Make sure you (or your mum) get the 2000-2004 edition. If it doesnt happen then the RYA will be publishing the new rules soon anyway.

More stuff next time..................