Fleet Race tune up + a little TR

FJ boats will work together with the 420’s on some basic/advanced boat handling today, sail trim/weight trim work, and then FJ’s will break off with me and maybe have a few TR’s. We are also giving our weekend freshman FJ team a chance to tune up in this boat.

3 things in Focus for today:

• Crews work on jib trim in/during a tack. Try to be as still as possible as the boat turns into the wind, then slight backwind, rolling as late as you can (jib past head-to-wind), and then foot-switch/backwards tack to climb up quickly to help flatten. In light/medium winds, two things are now critical:
  • understand your skippers weight and tendencies, and help flatten but do not overflatten. If you are very light, you can climb up more aggressively and roll harder… and not necessarily need to duck back down in (or even to leeward) quite as quickly. If you are tall and/or bigger, you need to be hyper-sensitive to over-flattening. Make sure you come back down/in super fast so the boat doesn’t flatten too much or too quickly
  • Do NOT trim jib in all the way right away. Your initial sheet switch should have the jib trimmed, depending on conditions, about 3-7 inches out from max trim. The final steady trim pull comes as boat flattens out and the mainsail trims in. If you can time your final jib trim with your skippers mainsail trim, you are doing a very good thing
• Crews (and skippers) work on downwind weight trim that is sensitive and focuses on keeping the boat tracking on its center-line downhill. Be extremely careful of turning too much, and flattening with the rudder turned off centerline more than a few degrees. You also know you’ve had a bad gybe if, after the gybe/flatten, the skipper has to steer to weather (push the tiller away) to counteract the boats momentum to want to bear off. This is VERY slow. Your weight can really do all of the work in a gybe. The gybes below may look too soft, but you will notice that the boat is almost always pointed directly downwind, and the boat never slows down:

• TEAMS, work on sailing upwind and downwind with weight trim, not steering. Rudders are fastest when they’re straight in the boat, and not always necessary. Here’s an example…. what is NOT in this boat??