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Board » General Discussion » Real Life Sailing and SOL

Posted by
zero


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2010-02-07 16:56:30
2010-09-16 16:30:45 - Real Life Sailing and SOL
Never had I sailed so well as in the last Auckland Regional 3 race.
I was there with the big boys, side by side with Jepsom, Winston, Theviking and many others. At one point I was even in 1st place in the leader board. Exciting.

My crew was performing flawlessly as always. Here on SOL we all have the best crew ever, the weak link is always on the navigator.

I have to admit that it was an easy race to navigate. By help of Mother Nature most of the rhumb lines were at max speed. All we had to do was sailed at the TWA that gave max Boat Speed. Easy.

Max speed TWA to Little Barrier Island, to Channel Island 1 and to the Gannet Rock.
Fantastic, side by side with Winston. Theviking a tiny bit ahead, we all zooming with the kite up.

Them it came the final leg. Upwind leg. Again I made the right decision to go right since I knew the wind would be shifting right at some point. No brainer, everyone in the leading pack went right. Perfect, or so I thought.

Them one of my crew said, captain there is an island in the way, what you want us to do, pass south or go north? The Rakino Island was in our way. Oh Boy!
Big decision, tack south of the island or delay the tack and go north?
The wind was shifting fast but was it shifting as fast to go south and still make it the channel without an extra tack?

Big decision. The only real decision to make in the race.

This whole race, all 18 hours of it came down to ONE decision. ONE!
And I got it wrong. I went North.
Hew565 and Winston (as always) got it right and tacked early to pass south of the island.
I went from podium to 30+.

My point is, 18 hours of perfect sailing, perfect crew work, perfect gybes. All spoiled by ONE bad decision of the Navigator. Me.
If this was a real life boat I would not know how to face my bowman, my skipper, the grinders and everyone else in the crew.

ONE bad call spoiled the smile of a whole group of good guys. Who worked hard for almost a day nonstop. I was well awake, I can’t blame sleep.

The interesting point here is about SOL.
I’ve made many wrong tactical decisions on my years of sailing but never was it as crystal clear as is in SOL where the bad decision happened.
I’ve spent countless hours sitting on bars after each race going thru the mistakes. We blame the sail makers, the crew (of course), the bottom paint, you name it. The most blamed of all was always the boat designer which happened to be me (most of the times).

The truth is now clear, it was most likely due to a tactical error at some point during the race(s). The navigator. (Most of the cases where my job, so I am not blaming anyone else but me. Usually in those days the boat designer ended up being the navigator as well.

I wish I had SOL when I was starting sailing.
Evidently in real life we don’t have wind arrows floating on the ocean, or a sliding scale to see exactly what the wind will do in the near future. But, if you sail regularly in the same location you will, with time learn the wind pattern of the place. I did.
The question is, once you know well your sailing grounds what to do with the information. I never did know. I never act with all the information I knew. I never took advantage of being the “local guy”. I didn’t have SOL.

Some people are fortunate to have talent and “get it” without needing an explanation or some literature to learn from. Those are the super stars of Sailing.

For everyone else, SOL is precious.
So, if you are young, still with a long way ahead of real sailing take advantage of lessons we learn here and apply them in real life sailing.

Finally, I would like to hear stories of you who felt that the real sailing results have improved because of SOL. Please post here in this tread.

Thanks,
Antonio
Posted by
Yuan Hang


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2010-02-05 19:10:26
2010-09-17 17:47:33 - Re: Real Life Sailing and SOL
My story is a little (well, massively!) different....
In the real world I sail a little junk rigged cruiser named Yuan Hang - my SOL name. I have no particular interest in racing, I just go out for a relaxing time.
Although I'm the wrong side of 50 years old, I'm a relative newcomer to sailing, I've had my own boat for about 2 years and sailed for a year before that. I only took up sailing after my body decided it was too old for climbing!
I think SOL has already taught me a lot, watching for weather patterns and planning routes days ahead for instance.
Hopefully it will help improve my sailing!
I still don't think I'll be entering any real races, but you never know.....
I can see SOL keeping me busy through the winter.

--- Last Edited by Ken Powell at 2010-09-17 17:48:25 ---
Posted by
SWE54


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2007-08-11 10:02:20
2010-09-18 08:17:54 - Re: Real Life Sailing and SOL
This i one of the reasons for my blog. It's a personal debriefing, a good way to summarize and pin point things that went wrong and could have been done differently. We used to do this a lot after each real race back when I was racing, also personal things like crew work were analyzed of course. In SOL there is also another issue, time. Most of my own really stupid things is traced back to time issues. Things are forgotten under time pressure. Still it's a fantastic way to keep your head going..:)
Not all of my races will be published on the blog for the simple reason that it was obvious what happened or went really bad.If I can't sail the whole race at least at 75% capacity there is not much to debrief.

--- Last Edited by SWE54 at 2010-09-18 08:22:51 ---

--- Last Edited by SWE54 at 2010-09-18 08:23:19 ---

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