CampbellSailing.com » Agree to Disagree… Tactical Minds at Odds

Agree to Disagree… Tactical Minds at Odds

December 18th, 2008 in Monday Morning Tactician.

In an attempt to regroup after the campaign, I’ve neglected writing on the site, watched the readership dwindle as I’ve tried to recharge my batteries. The posts I’ve made have reflected the sailing that I’ve been doing. The Melges 24 dominated my fall schedule sailing a number of weekends with Stu McNay and Vincent Porter. We did some teamrace training with the Silver Panda team to help prepare for their upcoming world championships. The Melges 32 season has kicked into gear and I’m happy to be involved with the Ninkasi team and John Taylor. I’ve started writing some for Sailing World magazine, adapting some of the columns written for this site. I’ve started work at the Georgetown athletic department writing donor reports and helping with the advancement and fundraising department. The next move will be to get my energy focused. I’ve put the lasers up for charter and ultimately up for sale in an attempt to race in the star class at this winter’s Miami OCR and Bacardi Cup. I’m looking into the possibility of getting involved in some match racing starting with Dave Perry’s open clinic in January. There is certainly plenty on the docket, but it never seems like as much going on when you’re not sailboat racing 9-5 during an Olympic campaign. Without a doubt I’m jealous of the guys in Melbourne right now racing the first of the new World Cup Series.

The best part about this fall has been the heavy dose of learning material I’ve submitted myself to. Taking notes about Melges 24 tuning, or trimming a Melges 32 mainsail are skills I certainly wasn’t picking up in the Laser. And being able to translate my tactical game from Laser sailing into a crewed environment has been as rewarding as I knew it would be. Perhaps the most interesting part about sailing with a few different people and not having the tiller in my hand has been developing an understanding about how sailors’ mindsets differ so greatly. Sailing with Stu McNay on his new-to-him 24-footer was an insight into how different two successful sailing strategies can be. We had a lengthy discussion on the way in about a disagreement we had during the a race the day we picked up that man-overboard in Annapolis. He couldn’t figure out for the life of him what I was thinking, purely based on the numbers and the fact that we were lifted when I had called for a tack. Does the helmsman always have perfect information because he is staring at the compass numbers and it is clear whether we’re lifted or headed? Or does the helmsman have imperfect information because he cannot focus on the traffic around him enough to develop a necessary tactical advantage. I called for the tack because, regardless of whether we were lifted, threat of the fleet gaining leverage to the other side of us demanded our action. In my head, I knew that if the we followed the fleet, staying between it and the mark, we would be able to plant ourselves directly ahead going into the mark removing the effect of any further shift up the race course. I felt strongly that we had the opportunity to take the single scariest factor in boatracing out of the equation: the windshift. Stu’s argument was irritatingly valid: if we were on the lifted tack, and the fleet was on the headed tack gaining leverage the wrong direction… then all we needed to do was continue on until we got the next header and in doing so increase our lead. Well, doesn’t that just sound like a piece of cake! If it were always that easy.

We laughed our way through the options we had at that point in the race. As shown in the fact that Stu listened to his tactician and tacked when asked and argued afterwards, we were capable of having a valuable conversation. At the center of our disagreement was the essence of sailing tactics and strategy: 1. add risk and increase your lead and cushion any boatspeed or boadhandling mistakes, or 2. eliminate risk and take a slight loss knowing that you can keep a lead in close quarters. I was willing to take a potential slight loss in distance (by tacking off a header) in order to ensure lead position going around the next mark. Stu was willing to take a small risk (say risk potentially ten percent of gains made that race) in order to create an insurmountable lead thanks to a possible windshift. Both attitudes have the same strategy and endgame: to put our boat in a controlling, leading position for the next leg. We just had two different tactical ideas about how to make that happen. Oddly both strategies would have likely worked. Both of our strategies would have beaten the fleet to the next mark. His with the ten percent risk that we didn’t get the next shift and mine with the five percent risk that we would have two terrible tacks… Agree to disagree?

Good luck to Team USA in Melbourne.

56 comments.

Bob Kinsman

Comment on December 18th, 2008.

As a senior underwriter working in the residential mortgage industry and an active recreational sailor (J24 Fleet 50, Laser Fleet 413), your experience here really demonstrates the fundamental underuse and misunderstanding that most of us have of “hedging.” Most of us have either read or been trained to stay between our competitors and the next mark/finish, and when that advise flys in the face of “stay on the tack pointed closest to the mark” it takes a profound amount of steely nerves and professional detachment to tack away from that potential silver bullet . . . the elusive horizon job.

We all must learn to manage our greed, for better or worse.

Scow Sailor

Comment on December 19th, 2008.

I have to respectfully disagree. Your situation is implausible, even though it may have existed. Never do you find yourself as the only boat on the correct side of the course on the correct tack. Nor will you find you can cover an entire fleet. There will always be someone out to the right who will be hitting that shift. Covering the closest competitors going the wrong way simply means someone else will go the right way and beat you.

These decisions happen all the time in match racing and some team racing. But fleet racing requires that the decision based on wind outweigh most decisions based on positioning simply because there will always be some other boat that will get the shift right.

“Win the start and extend.” - Buddy Melges

I thoroughly enjoy this post and am glad to see you writing again.

Sam

Comment on December 19th, 2008.

It may be an insight into personalities - as you say ‘his new-to-him 24 footer’ - it implies that your helm owns the boat. Is likely therefore that he is a businessman who has made a few dollars here and there - probably by taking risks!

Most top tacticians are inherently risk averse because they have grown up dealing with the cruelness of the race track and know that starting well, sailing fast & minimizing risk can put together a pretty handy series.

David Fuller

Comment on December 20th, 2008.

Great to get your insights. Have added your blog to the reading list, so keep putting your point of view.

Mike B

Comment on January 15th, 2009.

A very engaging article (as always). For me it highlights the difference between “sailing as a job” and “sailing for fun” (I appreciate that in the latter especially there are many shades of grey (or gray to you guys :-)). If tacking into the header to be safe and only leading by 2 lengths around the top mark meant that when I got ashore my house was still standing, my job was safe and the dog had not run off with my wife, versus hanging on in the favoured shift hoping to extend to 10 lengths meant that I risked the house being burnt down, no job and the wife & dog both gunning for my bo**ocks then I’d take the safe (sensible) option. But as a weekend (not Monday morning) sailor I find it just plain more interesting to take the slightly-higher-risk-slightly-higher-reward option - I also feel that I might learn a bit more by playing it a bit wider and not just following the herd.

Nice to have you back.

Mike

disagree

Trackback on April 3rd, 2009.

disagree

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