I’m sure the more astute followers of ocean races have noticed that leaderboards are a poor way of judging positions in a race. Here I will outline why, how there is no fail-safe method and how I approach the problem vs my competitors.
Continue reading How to rank boats and why I hate the leaderboard
In the last chapter I’ve explained my approach to VMC-sailing, now let’s poke some holes into it. I do believe that a constant VMC target is the optimum solution for wind changing over time. That however leaves one mortal flaw: wind changes over space!
Let’s tackle the big one, VMC. To be blunt, the big difference between the top SOLers and the fleet is simply sailing faster. Here I will explore how.
Hitting islands is an easy and entirely too common way to ruin your race. The best SOLers do it once in a while. And of course there was the much talked about Vestas grounding. So how do we avoid this?
First off, no, Team Vestas were not taking any ‘risks’. To hit a fairly wide reef right in the middle, they had to be blissfully unaware of the obstacle.
Today I’ll put things in practice and route the Capetown – Abu Dabi race. As a handicap, I will only work with the COGOW prevailing winds charts. I have not run a software route of this course since May.
Here I’m going to outline the fundamental principles how I tackle WX routing. Honestly my approach is entirely intuition (or software of course), so I don’t have a strict formal way… but the basics are very true.
By ‘blind’ I mean that we’re not looking at the actual forecast, these are basic strategies that do have value in the right situation.
1. The rhumbline
The shortest distance between two points is a line. Point at your waypoint, go max VMG if needed.Pros: you get to your destination eventually.
It’s the shortest route, sort of.
Sometimes the fastest route, if only by accident.
Howdy!
This was spawned off the ‘sailors with routers’ debate, I will try to create a comprehensive guide of what goes into a successful SOL race.
I will start with a review of fundamental routing strategies. Explaining VMC and it’s applications is going to be the meat of this guide.