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- Herausgeber: Fernhurst Books Limited
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Learn the secrets of getting the most from your boat – whether you sail an entry level dinghy, high performance skiff, sportsboat or catamaran. Tips, advice and some great shortcuts from expert sailors in a wide range of classes gives you the inside knowledge to improve your techniques and get ahead of the fleet. There's step-by-step guidance, and every stage of asymmetric sailing is covered, including rigging and tuning, hoists, gybes and drops, tactics, survival sailing and advanced skills for solo and crewed boats.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Getting Started
Choosing the Right Boat
Apparent Wind Sailing
Getting the Basics Right
Going Sailing for the First Time
Safe Launch and Recovery
Chapter 2: Standard Moves
Tacking
Gybing Without the Gennaker
Hoisting the Gennaker
Lowering the Gennaker
Gybing with the Gennaker
Gybing in Light Airs
Chapter 3: Advanced Moves
Gybe Set
Gybe Drop
Beam Reaching
Tight Reaching
Great Boathandling Makes for Great Tactics
Chapter 4: Survival Sailing
Extreme Bear-Away
Extreme Conditions
Survival Sailing without the Gennaker
Survival Gybe
Tacking
Chapter 5: Avoiding Disaster
Make a Plan
Prepare for the Unexpected
Trawling the Kite
Twist in the Kite
Keep a Lookout Downwind
Taking Penalties
Capsizing
Chapter 6: Broaching & Capsizing
Capsizing
Why Capsizes Happen
OK, So You’ve Capsized. What Now?
Chapter 7: Boat Speed
Use the Force (in the rudder)
Which Mode Should I Be In?
Chapter 8: Racing
Getting Around the Course
The Windward Mark
Seizing Your Opportunities
Roll, Don’t Be Rolled!
Judging Laylines
Getting Through the Leeward Gate
Chapter 9: The Racing Rules
Know Your Lefts From Your Rights
Leeward Gates
Windward v Leeward Boat
Keeping a Lookout Downwind
Capsized Boat
Broaching in a Keelboat
Gybe-Set at the Windward Mark
Two Sails Against Three Sails on a Reach
Handicap Racing – Different Boats at the Same Mark
Bowsprit in ‘Normal Position’
Gybing a Fully-Battened Mainsail Without Upsetting the Umpires
Chapter 10: The Final Five Per cent
Perfecting Your Equipment
Team Work and Communication
Goal Setting – Do This and You Will Always Improve
This edition first published 2012
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN: 9780470974261 (pbk); ISBN: 9781119952671 (ebk); ISBN: 9781119952657 (ebk); ISBN: 9781119952664 (ebk); ISBN: 9781118367186 (ebk).
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Acknowledgements
The Experts
There are many friends and experts whose advice I sought when writing the book, some of them quoted, some of them not. From 20 years of racing in fleets like the Laser 5000, the 49er, International 14 and Musto Skiff, I’ve had the fortune to race with or against some of the best skiff sailors in the business, and I’ve badgered them for tips and advice along the way. There isn’t room to mention everyone I spoke to, but here’s a brief background of some of the experts whose advice crops up in the book.
Glenn Ashby, Olympic medallist from Australia, multiple world champion in a range of multihulls and America’s Cup winning coach.
Trevor Baylis, a great crew who makes every boat he gets into go faster. He’s won the 505, International 14 and 18ft Skiff World Championships.
Mitch Booth, Dutch, Spanish, Australian? I’m not sure which, but he still sounds Aussie to me. Wherever he’s from, a great multihull sailor with two Olympic medals and fistful of world titles.
Paul Brotherton, a 49er European Champion from Great Britain, former 470 Olympic representative, and one of the best coaches in the business. He coached the Yngling girls to Olympic gold in Qingdao 2008 and the British 49er team for Weymouth 2012.
Andy Budgen, one of the most talented skiff sailors even if he’s not a household name. He’s placed 2nd in the 49er Worlds and 18ft Skiffs and coaches many top teams in the 49er class.
Darren Bundock, the most successful small cat sailor ever? Not sure, but this Australian has been there done it, with two Olympic medals and a boatload of multihull world titles in the Tornado and F18 classes, and a few others besides.
Geoff Carveth, one of Britain’s biggest names outside the Olympic scene, with two SB20 world titles and many national dinghy titles in all kinds of classes, asymmetrics included.
Derek Clark, a 470 Olympian, America’s Cup designer, and the driving force behind a number of skiff projects including the Laser 5000 and more recently the Rebel Skiff, which features in many of the photo sequences in the book.
Chris Draper, 49er World Champion and Olympic medallist, and in recent years an Extreme Sailing Series champion and America’s Cup skipper in the ultra-fast AC45 multihulls.
Dave Hivey, one of Britain’s up and coming talents on the small boat scene, having won national titles in the highly competitive RS200 and RS400 fleets.
Brian Hutchinson, known as the go-to guy in the Melges fleet. A Melges 24 World Champion from the USA, Brian’s knowledge of asymmetrics and sportsboats knows no bounds.
Steve Irish, a 420 World Champion who moved into asymmetrics and won the RS800 Nationals. Steve is in great demand as a full-time coach to Britain’s Olympic and youth squads.
Stevie Morrison, 49er and Fireball World Champion from Britain, with a great natural flair for making a boat go fast.
Chris Nicholson, dominated the 18ft Skiff circuit back in its professional heyday, then won three 49er World Championships. These days Chris makes his living as a skipper in the Volvo Ocean Race.
Charlie Ogletree, Olympic silver medallist in the Tornado, and the only sailor ever to have trimmed an asymmetric sail at an Olympic Games, going upwind!
Richard Parslow, a Fireball World Champion, and my coach when I was in the British 49er squad. A goal-setting expert extraordinaire.
Rick Perkins, a Fireball National Champion, but more importantly for this book, a Musto Skiff National Champion.
Frances Peters, ISAF Youth World Champion in the 29er class. She won the girls’ fleet but she probably would have beaten the boys too. A rising star in skiff sailing.
Mari Shepherd, a top 29er crew, and never afraid of a new challenge, such as when we put her out in the Rebel Skiff for our windy photoshoot.
Chris Simon, rules expert and consultant who has worked at every level of the sport, including the Olympics, America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race.
Photographers
Thanks to the photographers and organisations who were kind enough to allow the use of their work for this book.
Ingrid Abery, for her excellent cover shot (www.hotcapers.com)
Fiona Brown, for some great Melges 24 shots (www.fionabrown.phanfare.com)
Brian Carlin, wonderful SB20 photos (CubeImages.com)
GBR International 14 Class, with special thanks to Andrew Penman (gbr.international14.org)
Roland and Nahid Gaebler, for their Tornado images (www.teamgaebler.de)
Natalie Hilton, for her Musto Skiff photos
Gunnar Larsen, for the Nacra catamaran photos (www.nacrasailing.com)
Paul Manning, for photos from the archive of the Musto Skiff Class Association (www.mustoskiff.com)
Chris Simon, for his brilliant illustrations for the Rules chapter
Thanks for the boats
Alice Moore for the loan of her RS200 for a photoshoot at my sailing club, Stokes Bay Sailing Club
Derek Clark for driving the photo boat and the loan of his Rebel Skiff, and to Andy Budgen, Dave Hivey and Mari Shepherd for getting very wet in the making of those photos.
About the Author
Andy Rice has won championships from both ends of a skiff, winning a 49er national championship as a helm and International 14 Europeans and Prince of Wales Weeks as a crew. He has sailed with a number of top sailors over the years, including Olympic medallists John Merricks, Ian Walker and Simon Hiscocks.
As a sailing journalist, he has reported on every major event from the Olympics to the America’s Cup, the Volvo Ocean Race and the Vendée Globe. He writes for many racing-oriented magazines including Seahorse, Yachts and Yachting, Yachting World, Boat International and Sailing World.
Together with James Boyd, editor of the news website TheDailySail.com, Andy runs Sailing Intelligence, a specialist marine media agency. Andy’s passion is for asking great sailors what makes them tick, and finding out why they’re so fast. That was the basis of writing Asymmetric Sailing, and is also the basis of SailJuice.com, Andy’s online treasure trove of top sailboat racing tips.
Learn more about Asymmetric Sailing
Go to www.wileynautical.com/asymmetric for more tips, plus interviews, videos and further links.
INTRODUCTION
Who will benefit from this book?
I’m going to assume that you’re already familiar with the sport of sailing, and that you’ve done a bit of racing too. This book is not aimed at the novice, although it is aimed at sailors who may never have sailed boats with asymmetric spinnakers before. It is hard to write a book that will appeal to all types of asymmetric sailor, but in this book you’ll discover I’ve interviewed a range of experts across a spectrum of sailing boats powered by asymmetric sails.
We’ve got tips on how to get the best out of:
small dinghies like the RS200 and RS400,
high performance skiffs such as 49ers and International 14s,
high performance multihulls such as Tornados and Formula 18 catamarans, and
sportsboats such as the Melges 24 and SB20.
Competitive racing in the Melges 24 fleet
Even if your particular boat isn’t directly covered in this book, I really hope you get some great tips from some of the experts we’ve gathered together, and that you’ll be able to carry over some of the hot tips into your own asymmetric sailing.
Asymmetric Sails + Apparent Wind = Fast and Fun
To sail successfully with an asymmetric spinnaker – or gennaker – requires you to start understanding what apparent wind is. Apparent wind is the wind that is generated by the boat moving forwards. It’s the same wind as you feel when you stick your hand out the window of a car when the car is moving, or it’s the wind in your face when you are cycling. It’s artificially generated wind, so you can feel apparent wind even when there is no true wind blowing at all.
Understanding the effect of apparent wind is crucial to sailing with asymmetric spinnakers, but it will also help improve your understanding of all types of sailing. It’s easy to think that, on a simple singlehanded boat like an Optimist, Topper or Laser, you run downwind just by presenting the sail to the wind and getting blown along, without any flow across the sail. Indeed that’s how most club sailors do run downwind in a Laser, but ask an Olympic standard sailor how they steer the Laser downwind, and they’re always doing angles, always with flow across the sail. They may be sailing a greater distance, but the increased efficiency by having flow across the sail more than makes up for the extra distance.
Harnessing apparent wind is the key to fast sailing in asymmetrics
Unlike a conventional, symmetric spinnaker or the mainsail on a singlehander, the asymmetric spinnaker cannot function without flow across the sail. It is absolutely reliant on wind blowing across the sail. But once you understand this, and that by combining the true wind with the apparent wind generated by your forward motion, then you will discover that you can achieve much greater boatspeeds. Many asymmetric dinghies and multihulls are capable of travelling at least as fast as wind speed and in some extreme cases such as the AC45 America’s Cup catamarans, travelling in excess of three times true windspeed is achievable.
One of the fun by-products of asymmetrics is that for the reasons just given, you can’t sail dead downwind – or at least it’s very slow and inefficient to do so. Because you want to maximise the apparent wind, you are always sailing angles downwind. Now the run starts to feel similar to an upwind leg, where any sailor knows that it is impossible to sail directly to the windward mark. Well, to some extent the same is true with an asymmetric boat. You have to sail angles, and that makes for a much more tactically interesting and challenging scenario.
AC45 America’s Cup catamarans can travel up to three times the speed of the wind
However, an asymmetric sail’s inability to sail dead downwind is not always a good thing. For example, if you are sailing in confined waters such as in a river or a stream, or you are running close to a shore against an adverse tide, you don’t want to have to drive out into stronger tide. So there are times when you notice the limitations of an asymmetric sail; but most of the time – and certainly in open water – the benefits of an asymmetric far out weigh the benefits of a symmetrical sail. With the asymmetric’s superior ability to generate its own wind, it encourages you to start looking for gusts, to look around for the strongest wind on the water. In a high performance boat, finding one knot more of true wind speed can help generate as much as two knots more of actual speed through the water.
So there are very good tactical and strategic reasons for sailing with an asymmetric. In many ways it makes the game more difficult and more challenging but, ultimately, more rewarding when you start to appreciate the tactical and strategic rules of asymmetric sailing.
One of the other benefits of the asymmetric is that, by and large, it is much easier to hoist, gybe and lower an asymmetric spinnaker than a conventional symmetrical spinnaker. It’s why, over the past ten years, the majority of beginners and family-oriented boats have come fitted with asymmetric spinnakers rather than anything else.
You have a bowsprit, sometimes fixed but quite often retractable. On many modern dinghies and catamarans, the gennaker halyard is also connected to a set of blocks which pull the bowsprit out at the same time. So one person pulls just one rope which launches the pole and hoists the sail in one movement. Compare this with a spinnaker where typically, on a two-person boat, it might be the helm who’s busy hoisting the spinnaker to the top of the mast while the crew is busy connecting one end of the pole to the guy, connecting the centre of the pole to the topping lift, and connecting the inboard end of the pole to the loop on the mast and then setting the spinnaker guy to the right place.
Some people enjoy the challenge of that and, for many sailors, it is one of the fun aspects of crewing. Some would argue that there is a lot of skill in how you get the best out of a spinnaker. The other side of it is that it is much easier to learn how to sail with a gennaker, because you just pull one rope and you’re away. In fact, one friend asked me how I could find enough information to fill a whole book on the subject. Yes, at its very simplest, you pull in a gennaker sheet until the sail stops flapping. That’s it! End of book!
Handling a gennaker is more straightforward than a traditional spinnaker
The author sailing a Devoti D-1 at Lake Garda
But the reality is that while gennakers are very forgiving sails to use, they also tend to be attached to boats that are very demanding to sail and race. This book is dedicated to helping you get to grips with the wider game of asymmetric sailing and racing. In the process of researching this subject I’ve spoken to some of the very best in the business. After almost 20 years of racing boats at world championship level – such as 49ers, International 14s and SB20s – I thought I knew most of what there was to know, but the asymmetric spinnaker is still a fairly new innovation in the history of sailing and we’re learning new tricks all the time. This book condenses the very best of what I’ve learned up to now. I hope you enjoy it, and that you find good, solid tips that you can apply to your own asymmetric sailing.
Andy Rice, July 2012
P.S. Throughout the book I refer to ‘asymmetric spinnakers’, ‘asymmetrics’, ‘gennakers’ (half genoa/half spinnaker), and ‘kites’. They are all one and the same thing. I try to avoid the term ‘spinnaker’, reserving that for conventional, symmetrically-shaped spinnakers.
CHAPTER 1
GETTING STARTED
Choosing the Right Boat
It’s not within the scope of this book to ask you too many questions about what kind of boat you plan to sail. Because asymmetrics come in many different shapes and sizes, it’s difficult to hand out any specific advice, but I just want you to be sure that you’ve thought about the following factors:
Ability
Do you have the ability to sail the boat competently? Or, let’s put it another way, do you have the potential? Now, I know sailors in their 50s and 60s who handle the 18-foot Skiff and Musto Skiff very competently, and asymmetric boats don’t get much harder than that. Ian Renilson is still knocking in top ten finishes at Musto Skiff World Championships well into his 50s, although he is a former Contender World Champion. But Ian, like most other Musto Skiff sailors, did a lot of capsizing and swimming before he reached a certain level of competence. Are you prepared to do the same? If so, great! If not, then maybe you want something a bit more stable and easier to handle.
The 18-foot Skiff is great fun if you know what you’re doing, but it will bite you if you don’t!
Team
Are you going to be sailing in a team boat? If so, how much can you rely on your team mate(s) to show up on a regular basis? Better to agree on the goals and the schedule for the year before you put down your hard cash on a boat.
Budget
Do you have the money, not just for the boat, but for its upkeep and maintenance? If you’re racing a boat where you expect to be doing a lot of capsizing and putting the equipment through quite a bit of abuse while you drag yourself up the learning curve, then it may be better to do your learning on a well-sorted secondhand boat. Even better if you can get the seller to throw in a day’s coaching to help you get to grips with the basics. It’s also a great way to check that the boat you’re buying is working properly and that you haven’t been sold a pup.
To sail a high-performance boat well, team mates need to share the same goals and ambitions
Local fleet
Is there a local fleet at a nearby sailing club, or a good racing circuit that you can get involved in? While any new boat is exciting to sail initially, the novelty will eventually wear off. But it’s the racing and the camaraderie that will keep you interested. So give this factor some serious thought before deciding which boat to sail.
Apparent Wind Sailing
Got to get up to get down. . .
One of the difficult things to get your head around when you’re discovering asymmetric sailing for the first time is the idea that if you want to get downwind you need to head up first. In planing conditions, if you want to get the bow pointing as low as possible downwind and make the best VMG (Velocity Made Good) to the next mark at the bottom of the course, then the way to do that initially is actually to head up as high away from the wind as you can. Unless you do this, you’re not really apparent wind sailing, you are just wafting downwind with the breeze and the gennaker will be caught behind the mainsail and the jib, and will never get a chance to fill properly. So, if you’re new to this, the first thing to do is to head up perhaps more than you think you need to, and get the air flowing across the gennaker from luff to leech and drafting out the back of the sail.
To create your apparent wind, first you need to luff up to build the speed
Once you do that, the apparent wind will kick in and start building on itself. As the apparent wind increases, it also moves forward and you need to sheet on the gennaker and the mainsail to compensate. And, if it’s windy, you’ll need to hike out as hard as possible to counteract the increase in power. In strong winds you’ll find those who hike out hardest actually end up sailing lowest and deepest towards the leeward mark. At first it doesn’t seem to make sense. After all, in most sailing you sit in to sail lower, but not in an asymmetric when you’ve got the power of apparent wind on your side.
How low can you go?
In light to medium airs, when there isn’t enough wind to get the boat planing, then it’s about sailing as low as possible before you experience a massive drop-off in flow across the sails. Where sailing dead downwind is an option in non-asymmetric boats, it’s never an option with asymmetrics. You always need to sail angles downwind, and in light to medium conditions the trick is finding out just how low you can go.
MELGES 24s trying to ‘soak’ low in non-planing conditions
On a keelboat you may have electronic GPS equipment which you can use to help determine your best VMG downwind. On a dinghy or a small multihull, you don’t have that luxury so you have to develop a feel for when you think the boat is travelling at the optimum VMG downwind. Quite often you can’t really work this out until you start racing other boats, when you can compare yourself to others nearby. In marginal planing conditions you’ll find there are those who like pushing high and sailing extra distance for the extra speed, while there are those who like really running deep and going slower, but sailing a shorter distance to the next mark.
Both those extremes have their place, and sometimes it pays to do a little bit of each. A lot of the time, the decision that you make about whether to sail in high, medium or low mode is based on the tactics of where the boats around you are, and where you’re aiming for next. It is also based on where you think the best breeze is. Sometimes, when you’re in a nice but narrow line of breeze, it pays to sail low to stay in it as long as possible. The temptation can be to head up, get on the plane and sail really fast – only to sail yourself out of the breeze line.
Two International 14s sailing in very different modes
So it’s really important to be able to sail in all these modes. We’ll address this in Chapter 7, Boat Speed. And it’s also important to know how and when to apply these modes on the race course, which we’ll address in Chapter 8, Racing: Strategy and Tactics.
Getting the Basics Right
How is your boat rigged: bag or chute?
If you’re using a boat with a spinnaker chute then it’s the crew who tends to do all the hoisting in a two-handed boat. The helm’s chief job is to steer the boat so that it’s upright and stable and gives the crew plenty of opportunity to hoist the spinnaker without worrying about helping to keep the boat upright.
With a boat with a chute, you might want to share out the job of hoisting the gennaker, as there are more ropes to pull. So, for example, in the Laser 5000, a typical routine would be for the helm to pull up the spinnaker halyard while the crew pulls out the pole and the tack line. So it’s a matter of dividing up the workflow in such a way that you get your gennaker up and pulling in the shortest amount of time after the windward mark.
Despite the enormous sail, the 18-foot skiff gennaker is launched and retrieved into a bag
In a boat with three or more crew, such as a Melges 24 or SB20, then you can divide up the workload even more. So in the case of a three-person SB20, the typical work pattern would be:
Helm continues to steer while taking the mainsheet from the middle man.
Forward hand goes to leeward to prepare the gennaker by opening up the bag. He then pulls out the bowsprit. At the helmsman’s command the forward hand hoists the gennaker and cleats it off.
While the forward hand is hoisting the gennaker, the middle man pulls the tack line until the tack reaches the end of the bowsprit. He then moves straight to the kite sheet (taking it from the helm if the helm has already picked it up) and gets the kite set while the forward hand sets the jib and tidies the cockpit and the kite halyard in particular.
Rigging the Gennaker
When you rig the gennaker, make sure you get it right before you go afloat! I can guarantee that at some point in your asymmetric sailing career, you will forget this simple advice. Some lessons you have to learn for yourself, and believe me, there are few more embarrassing or painful that having to re-rig the gennaker out on the water. It’s not easy, and it often results in a capsize. You can remind me of this fact the next time you see me up on the foredeck of my Musto Skiff!
Have a set routine for rigging the boat, and you’ll avoid foul-ups on the water
If you launch from bags, as with a B14 or an 18-foot Skiff, then at least all you have to do is tie three corners to the correct rope. But for the sake of simplicity and avoiding silly errors, make sure you write ‘Tack’, ‘Clew’ and ‘Head’ on the correct corners. And I’d tie them on in that order too, although this isn’t too critical. One reason for doing this is for rigging up on a windy day, when you don’t want to have the kite blowing around the dinghy park and potentially capsizing your boat. Having the names written on the corners means you can have the kite stuffed in the bag and still tie on the corners without exposing too much sail to the wind.
Now, if you launch from a chute, which is the norm for most asymmetric dinghies and small catamarans, then you have the added complication of a retrieval line, which is basically the other end of the halyard because it’s one continuous line. The retrieval line makes it much more possible to create tangles and to get it wrong if you’re not careful with your rigging procedure. It also makes it much harder to re-rig it on the water if you get it wrong, so it’s particularly important to make sure that you’ve got your rigging correct with a chute style of boat.
There are different ways of doing it, but my favourite way of rigging a gennaker on an International 14 or a 49er for example, is to:
tie the tack first, with the bowsprit retracted into the boat;
loop the kite sheets through the clew and reeve the port sheet through the port-hand ratchet block on the boat;
pull the foot of the sail tight so that you know there’s no tangle. I do this on the port side of the boat on the 14 because this is the side where the kite hoists from;
take the retrieval line (already threaded through the spinnaker sock) and run it underneath the foot of the sail, and then run it through the bottom retrieval patch near the foot;
depending on whether you’ve got a one-, two- or three-patch retrieval system on your kite, make sure that the halyard is going through all the correct patches, and then tie the end of the retrieval line off to the top retrieval patch;
take the other gennaker sheet that runs around the starboard side of the boat, take this starting from the clew, and run it along the side of the boat
inside
the gennaker, making sure it goes over the
top
of the retrieval line, runs around the forestay and then back down the other side of the boat through the ratchet block;
tie off your gennaker sheets in the middle of the cockpit, and
tie the halyard on to the head of the kite.
The reason for attaching the halyard last is so that if the wind does catch the sail while you’re rigging it, you’re not going to get it filling and flying out from the top of the mast, potentially capsizing the boat and causing damage while you are on the shore. So the gennaker halyard is always the last thing to be tied on and then you’re ready to fully retract the kite into the chute and that should make sure that you don’t have any tangles. If it’s windy you can pull most of the sail into the chute before you attach the halyard.
If the winds are light, and you don’t think it’s going to cause any harm to the boat, then take the opportunity to double check your rigging. Hoist the gennaker to the top of the mast and make sure that all the sheets are running clear. If the winds are strong, the chances are you won’t get an opportunity to do that, which means that when you get out on the race course, unless it really is extremely windy, you want to check that you rigged the gennaker correctly as early as possible before the start of the race. If by any chance you have made a mistake, you at least give yourself the maximum time to put it right. But good luck!
Yellow retrieval line is tied with a long bowline to keep the patches apart as they go into the chute
