Let Your Weight Work For You
Let Your Weight Work For You
When sailing in light air and chop, conventional wisdom says to keep the crew weight together to minimize pitching. But if you watched the U.S. Olympic Yngling team of Sally Barkow, Carrie Howe, and Debbie Capozzi sail in light air and chop, you may have seen something different-they weren't always bunched together in the middle of the boat. Rather, they were spread out, and they were going fast. Dave Powlison spoke to their coach, James Lyne, who explains what they were doing and why.
Rethinking weight placement in chop to deal with pitching was a matter of revisiting old lessons. I remember talking to Charles Curry, who had won the Finn silver medal at the 1952 Olympics, which was well before I was even born. He told me that, in the old days, when his Finn started pitching too much, he would fill his bow tank with a bucket of water. Here was a silver medalist, who, at the time, was one of the world's best singlehanded sailors, and he was spreading out the weight instead of consolidating it. I was too young to clue into it when he was telling me this, but it's a story that stuck with me.
Builders do all they can to centralize weight to create a relatively good center of gravity, linearly, which helps reduce pitching. However, when the crew is a big portion of the all-up weight, such as the Yngling, with 440 pounds of crew weight on a 1,430-pound boat, you're talking about a fairly significant ability to change the boat's dynamics by moving the crew around. Just because the wind is light and the chop is up doesn't mean you always want to consolidate crew weight.
The key is to look at frequency, how quickly the boat is pitching, and amplitude, identified by the arc through which the top of the mast moves. Then the question becomes, which is causing the biggest performance loss? Is it that you're pitching too fast or is it that the radius you're going through is too big?
