There’s More Than One Reason for Having a Game Plan at a Regatta

by Kim Couranz (originally published on SpinSheet Magazine)

When communication was limited, a game plan helped ensure a common understanding of what had to be done on the racecourse.

Breakfast the morning of the final day of Snipe North Americans in October was uncharacteristically quiet. My skipper had lost her voice. 

“Hah, that’s from her yelling at you so much yesterday in the big breeze, right?” our fellow sailors joked around the table. Actually, I think it’s because she laughed so loudly at too many of my jokes, because I am nothing if not hilarious on the boat.

But what was amusing over cereal was not as funny on the water. It was a windy day—a chilly 18-22 knots as we prepared for our first start of the day. Trying to hear a faint whisper from the back of the boat was going to be challenging.

So, I said (me being the only person on the two-person boat who could actually say anything at that point), “It’s always important to have a game plan for the race, at least for the first beat, but it’s especially important here. We need to have a common understanding of what we think we need to do to succeed on the first beat, so we can hop on it without having to talk about it.”

Skipper nodded yes. 

I talked us through some of the key features of the racecourse and forecast, and we agreed on a few important points:

Tide was just past low tide, so any current running wouldn’t be as strong as we had seen for much of the weekend. But we still wanted to be aware that there might be current running down the course from the weather mark—and also some from left to right looking upwind.

In our pre-race tuneups, looking at the course setup, it appeared that there would be more time spent on starboard tack than on port to reach the weather mark.

The weather forecast called for the breeze to go further right and to increase, but exactly when that would happen was unclear.

Our analysis was that, ideally, we’d be toward the boat end of the starting line, with a hole that would allow us to stay on starboard tack for a good while. 

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