Barely Legal

© Bill Records

Crewing in light air: no pain, no gain.

At the windward mark, once again be prepared for a double tack, especially if there’s current. Given how slowly the fleet will be moving, you should be able to accurately judge where you can punch into the layline—and make sure not to foul, because spinning will not be fast. Try to ease the controls (they shouldn’t be cranked anyway, but ease outhaul and take off the touch of Cunningham you might have on), and turn around smoothly. Ideally, you’ll have already turned around after your last tack onto starboard, but if not make sure not to shake the rig as you rotate to face forwards. If you’re gybing around the mark, get vang on and make it a huge gybe, and then ease vang, pull up the board, and settle in to jib reaching.

Jib reaching is an excuse to act a few inches taller. Photo: Bill Records

Jib reaching in light air is—painful. With your face nearly in the water and arms stretched out, you can’t see the breeze behind you, and you can only see the boats ahead of or alongside you. This is when it helps to have a constant dialogue with your skipper. You can be feeding him or her information about the pressure on the jib, the breeze you feel on your skin, and your angle relative to the leeward mark(s). Your skipper can be talking to you about what they see on the course and what they’re thinking about doing. Some skippers might not like to voice these thoughts, which is a style that you have to respect, but when you’re sailing with one who does it’s beneficial to both of you—both for strategizing and for staying calm—to be quietly talking the whole time.

Once again, you need to make sure that every movement you make maximizes your speed while staying within the realm of what is legal. If you do have enough breeze to go to the wing, make sure that it’s a smooth movement and that you hold out the boom with the hand that is not handing the jib sheet to your skipper, or it will collapse into the boat. Keep as much windward heel as possible, and make sure that you keep a steady angle while also peering behind you for fresh breeze. You should have the centerboard essentially all the way up as you glide downwind, and make sure that neither of your jib sheets are dragging in the water.

Getting your hand on the boom when you go down to a wing is critical. Photo: Bill Records

If the puff you’re in dies, or you want to head up to get clear air or set up for the next breeze, you can legally get a rock out of it if you’re careful. When your skipper tells you to take the jib back, put down the board and take the slack out of the vang and you can both do a coordinated roll to leeward—then come up to the middle to flatten—and then slide back out to counter-flatten and return to reaching while you bring the board back up to about 75% and ease vang.

Your gybes should be huge, but you need to be careful not to over-flatten or have your mast go past vertical more than once. You need to adjust your flatten based on the size of your skipper and their preferences; with a smaller skipper, you should hit the windward rail as quickly as possible before diving to leeward for the counter-flatten to prevent fishtailing, but if you have a big skipper you might just want to flatten by coming up to the center of the boat.

More than anything, you need to practice light-air racing and boathandling with the person you sail with over and over again. Don’t use glass, broken by a handful of puffs, as a reason not to practice; instead, go out and do boathandling drills of tacks and double tacks, gybes and double gybes, heading up and heading down; even practice circles. Your motions should be perfectly synchronized, and you need to be able to trust each other in order to pull off terrifyingly huge rolls successfully. Practice makes perfect, and in light air, everything needs to be perfect.

Amelia Quinn is a senior at Tufts University, studying a little bit of Arts and Sciences and a lot of sailing. Find more of her blog entries here.