We sit down with six time national champion, Will Paxton, to discuss both upwind and downwind sail trim.  Watch Paxton's raceQs' Geovid as the Quantum sailmaker and designer gives a breakdown of his performance during a one design Express 27 race.

We analyze two races on the same day and show just how much it changes your race to try and punch through headers, instead of tacking in them. With raceQs' built-in analytic tools, it's easy to see how the decisions you make on the race course affect your race statistics and overall performance. Missing just one header can change the geometry of the entire upwind leg as you sail sideways across the race course, instead of making the progress you need upwind.   

 Review the five gears of sailing, each designed for a different set of conditions or goals. Remember, just sitting in the groove doesn't win races. Experienced racers constantly change gears and make adjustments to get most out of every puff, lull, and shift.  

You can use your boat's wind wash to disturb the air of a sailboat by tacking directly underneath them, and slightly ahead of their bow. This is the "lee bow zone", and is a great way to catapult yourself to a better position in the race. In order to lee bow someone, you must tack directly underneath them, as close as physically and legally possible. When you complete the tack, your boat should be very close to the competitor, and about a half of a boat length ahead of them. 

A great introduction on how to use your wind shadow to cover someone, and how to escape a cover without losing too much ground. We introduce a new wind shadow feature in the raceQs' replay that changes size with the speed of the wind. The wind shadows project with the apparent wind angle, and add a whole new dimension to the 3D replays.  

The VMG polar charts in raceQs are a great tool to evaluate how quickly you complete and recover from your tacks. The VMG overlay is visible in “match mode”, and tracks your progress through the tack on a polar chart with the true wind angle as the vertical axis, shows your course as the angle of the vector, and your speed as the length of the vector. Each second, a colored dot indicating your VMG appears on the chart, showing your VMG for that last two minutes in a color-coded cloud.  

This podcast goes over the six gadgets in the raceQs replay dashboard: VMG, Course Over Ground, Speed Over Ground, Drift, Compass Heading, and Heel. The raceQs' phone app records data every second. After the replay is uploaded to the website, you can watch the replay and see your performance data displayed as a color coded histograms showing the last two minutes. A glance at the histogram color distribution makes it easy to evaluate your race performance.

Finishing out our four part series is this brief podcast on Jib draft depth and position.  We also talk about how to see the jib twist, and how the car position and sheet tensions affect trim.   This series is a great guide on how integrating a top view video with raceQs' Geovids will improve your racing analysis, and performance.  The view from the top gives us so much information about our sail trim, it took four podcasts!

Now you can finally tell when a tack is really good, or really terrible, and why.  In this podcast we review the basics of raceQs' tacking data and discuss the primary goal of tacking: lose as little time as possible.  We'll explain how you can measure your tacking angle and how slow you get.   

In this podcast we look at the the draft depth and draft position of the upper, middle, and lower parts of the main. Because GeoVids are synced with sailing data, we can search for moments of good VMG and evaluate how we trimmed our sails to get those positive results. We can also look at how our trim adjustments played out over time.

 

 

Using the mast view GeoVid, we have clear view of the draft stripe so we can use “AccuMeasure” to get exact figures for the draft position, depth, and even the mainsail twist. Comparing these numbers to our speed and VMG at different points in our race is a great teaching tool. Over time, we can get hard data for our trimmers on exactly what we need to do to excel in every condition.  

We continue the series on creating GeoVids using a camera mounted at the top of the mast.  In this episode, we discuss how to evaluate Weather Helm, Steering, and have an introduction to Mainsail Twist. 

Watch two professional skippers vie to be first to the windward mark in this superb race from the Adriatic Sea. We use this race to demonstrate many of the basic interface and analysis tools available in raceQs replays.

We have designed a cheap way to send your GoPro to to the top of the mast and record your race from the "top".  This angle is a great way to analyze  jib trim, car placement, helm position, and the shape of your sails.  In this Podcast, Julia demonstrates how to create a masthead GeoVid, and how to use a free online tool that calculates sail shape and draft position.

In this podcast we review VMG, or velocity made good, and essential concept that describes a boat progress to windward or to leeward.  We show how to use the raceQs tool to monitor your boats VMG, and discuss the difference between VMG and VMC, or velocity made to course.

In this Podcast, Julia shows you how to use raceQs' Geovids to evaluate your situational awareness on the water.  Using our tips, GeoVids can help you train yourself to improve your judgment of distances and make better tactical decisions in the heat of the moment.  Also, we discuss the applicability of these new technologies as evidence in protest hearings. 

Most people are overly conservative when evaluating the size of the "three boat length zone", near the mark.  There is a simple test you can do to see how well you are doing with this crucial estimate. Watch the Podcast to learn more!

 

 

In this podcast, we review how to make sure you're sailing the least possible amount of distance by always being on the lifted tack, and we show that trading height for speed on the upwind leg is rarely worth it.   We compare three boats, one which sails a very tight close-hauled course and tacks only on the headers, to two others, one which sails a much broader close-hauled course, and one which tacks onto the headed tack.  Predictably, the boat that sails high and stays on the lifted tack wins the windward leg

This short podcast uses raceQs GeoVids to explore ways to avoid hitting the mark, and how to recover from this common mistake.  GeoVids are videos that are synced with raceQs' 3D replays to provide more advanced post-race analysis.  This powerful tool helps to determine the cascade of small failrues that leads to a mistake like hitting the mark.  Also, we breakdown the number of penalty turns required for breaking the rules while rounding a mark.

In this podcast, we review how to make sure you're sailing the least possible amount of distance by always being on the lifted tack, and we show that trading height for speed on the upwind leg is rarely worth it.

In this podcast, we expand the upwind race geometry series by talking about the ladder rungs, the rhumb line, and building leverage.

With a clear picture of the risk/benefit tradeoff of various upwind strategies, sailors who understand the geometry can make the right call for any given conditions, as well as analyze poor performances with a better understanding of where the race went awry.

This daring strategy takes advantage of the natural holes in the fleet that develop just before the start.   While some sailors consider the port tack approach more of a back-up plan than a strategy, it can be very useful in a crowded fleet.

While appearing simple to execute, the elegance of this strategy is in the finer points.  For example, it's important to follow through with the maneuver, and carry the port tack all the way to the windward side of the starting line gap.  If you chicken out and tack too soon, you will have wasted a slot of clear air at a critical moment.  Properly executed, the port tack approach leaves the skipper space on the line to foot down and accelerate for a start with full speed, in clear air. 

 

 

 

In this podcast, we review laylines, ladder rungs, and the danger of getting to close to the edge of the course.

This installment of the sailboat race starting series teaches you how to execute and avoid the pitfalls of the common dinghy race start.  Also, get a quick tip on how to figure out which end of the starting line is favored.

In this podcast, we break down a chaotic rounding at a leeward gate.  The conclusion:  in your attempt to make a wide-and-tight rounding, or to get your spinnaker down, never leave the zone.

This short podcast shows how to avoid the crowd of “Reaching In, Reaching Out” starters and get clear air.  The Vanderbilt start begins with a broad reach away from the line, instead of a typical beam reach strategy.  After making a jibe for the start,  you approach attach the starting line with a confident full speed approach.   This strategy is easy to adjust if you misjudge the distance to the start, and using full speed gives the helm a lot of control to gain tactical advantage over other boats.

We demonstrate the cardinal rule of leeward-mark roundings: start wide and finish tight. Using an example from the 2013 Melges 24 World Championships, we show how failing to start wide and finish tight at the leeward mark puts a boat in a lower lane than her competitors: in that lower lane, she starts the windward leg at a serious disadvantage.  It's a great lesson and an eye-popping example of some of the world's best sailors making a classic mistake.  

This podcast is the first in the series about starting strategies. Reaching Out and Reaching In is a classic starting strategy, the first one that you learn.