One rule of thumb is to ease your sheets when you're feeling slow, but the goal should be to never get slow. Here's how.
One rule of thumb is to ease your sheets when you're feeling slow, but the goal should be to never get slow. Here's how.
It’s impressive how much one drill can reveal about a sailor's downwind technique, even at Olympic levels. This drill highlights rudder errors, sheeting mistakes and body position errors rapidly. It also provides a different, and great, sense of feel and connection with the boat. We recommend it for coaches as well.
Rarely, and for only short periods of time, can you experience a balanced helm during a 20+ knot downwind. Helm exists indefinitely; it’s just a matter of how much. As the wind increases, so does the factor of helm influenced by the center of effort vs the center of lateral resistance, heel angle and boat speeds.
Very few sailors excel in light wind and choppy water. It is the most challenging condition because your sail and telltales aren’t always working. You must constantly anticipate changes in boat speeds and this never allows you to get comfortable.
Once hiking conditions present themselves, a balanced boat with appropriate rig setup becomes particularly important to maximize your hiking efforts into productive speed. In order to obtain our upwind objectives, we need to get the powerful rig working for us by setting up appropriately for the conditions.
Fitness can really limit your upwind boatspeed when the breeze is up - consistent hiking on windy days can feel truly unsustainable. It’s a constant battle, with thousands of hours required in the gym and on the water to improve fitness. And while hiking may be paramount to upwind speed, there’s a lot of other technique involved that can help you go faster and even make hiking less painful. After all, there are some fast laser sailors who aren’t that fit. So what are they doing anyway that makes them so quick? This four part series will get you started.
