Class Association

"Build up to sailing at the RS Elite national championships - Charlie Marchant - JANUARY 2006 - from newsletter"

We’re all guilty of it, spending hours playing with bits of string, tinkering with blocks, shackles, rig settings, and the boat hasn’t even left it’s mooring or trailer, all this in the hope of achieving that big goal, a win. Personally I love to bimble, and have always taken a great pride in how my boat looks and works. I’m no guru in sail design or rig set up but I soon learnt however that non of these things were going to be the major factor in getting results sailing an RS Elite.

The fact is, the secret was going to be ‘good old teamwork’. I began sailing the boat back in the winter of it going through those drawn out stages of it being a prototype. What a job I hear you all say, but cold winter mornings, trying to lifeboat launch the boat down the slip with the tide half out, only to find that the keel needs to be moved and it’s got to come back out and get modified. It was during these short but sweet sails though that I got hooked. Things moved on and the boats began getting manufactured and the fleets became established at HISC and Burnham.

It was at this time that Buzz (my best mate for years and past RS 800 helm) suggested that we should look to rekindle our past team work and do a bit of RS Elite sailing, seemed like a plan. All be it that we could, as many do, have sailed the boat two up but we wanted to sail for fun and Alex joined the team as our lynch pin as a middle man. The three of us grew as a team over the months by socialising together, going to Monaco for the rally, playing golf together, etc…

Now a team, so the sailing began. Our first trip out in the boat was at the open meeting held at HISC. This was just meant to be a feeder into getting started and to find out if it was going to work. The winds were light and I was at the helm, constantly getting told by the guys to sit on the tiller and stop moving it! Alex was on the main and just kept it on the move to keep the boat from stalling. Buzz was in the bow calling in the gusts and the shots, with some good calls too. Lots of lessons were learnt but the basis for a good team was in place. After a great weekends racing we were then set on preparing ourselves for the Nationals. Following the event there were a couple of minor changes that we wanted to make to the boat, like enabling the centre jammer to swing 360 and fix bobbles on the spinni pole to help with the launching and recovering of it. All were small things but ones that needed doing, if not just to overcome those few psychological thoughts.

We managed a few days sailing between the open and the nationals, but one weekend in particular where it all came together was only a couple of weeks before the Nationals itself. A good night’s sleep, no beer and some great food were all part of the mental preparation we needed for the weekend ahead. We went to Lymington, where the boat was based, for those enjoyable couple of days of intense training. On getting to the boat we set the rig up to the standard settings that I always set boats to, where there is about 80mm of pre-bend and a fingers gap between the front of the mast and the fordeck, (right or wrong I don’t know but it works). Before going afloat we all agreed that the breeze was up, so the D1’s got slackened off by 4 turns to put a bit more pre-bend in. Plenty of energy drinks (which always taste foul, but apparently they help!) were chucked onboard with a couple of Mars bars. The breeze was on and it soon became apparent that Buzz and I needed to swap roles. I was struggling to keep the boats speed up during the tack and then over cooking it in the gybes, meanwhile Buzz found the front of the boat frustrating. The change transformed everything. We spent about 8 hours out on the water per day sailing between two buoys getting in as many tacks and gybes as we could. A typical tack would be to get the speed up to a set number, then with a call from me in the bow of ‘three-two-one’, we’d ease the boat into the tack with everything cleated. As the boat rolled through so we’d move slowly through the boat whilst easing the main and jib. Naturally now knowing how each other moved in the boat we’d all sit down at the same time, aiming to only loose 0.6 of a knot. Then with a slow call again the sails would get re-trimmed and the speed would get called until back on the pace. This was repeated time after time until perfect. The same applied for the gybe, with small things getting changed each time until it ran smoothly, where the kite wouldn’t even consider a collapse.

As a change when the tide was slack it gave us the chance to look at something different, ‘boat control and responsiveness’. We’d sit completely stationary 3 boat lengths to leeward of a racing mark, and then time how long it took to power the boat up to max speed by the time we got to the buoy. Every time we did something different until we cracked a routine that seemed to work for us.

This all sounds very tedious, but it helped us deal with things as a team, especially when things were going wrong!! The week prior to the Nationals was one of discussing our plan of attack, and talking through various scenarios that we were sure to face. Again no late nights, good food and no beer were all part of the preparation to such an event. The event itself was one of the best I’ve sailed, with perfect breeze, plenty of sunshine and some great sailing banter both on and off the water! To sum up, there were two important things to our success in winning the RS Elite Nationals, they were: to work as a team, and in some respects more importantly due to the venue, ‘stay out of trouble’.

Enjoy sailing for the New Season ahead, and I look forward to seeing many of you out on the racecourse and in the bar for that good old bit of sailing banter.