Wind and Racing Strategy for Youth: ILYA Seminar

The ILYA, Roble/Shea Sailing, and SailZing, LLC are partnering to develop a series of videos for youth sailors with insights from ILYA’s Olympic qualifiers, Stephanie Roble and Maggie Shea. The videos are edited recordings of live webinars conducted in spring 2020. This week’s topic is wind and racing strategy.

Steph and Maggie covered fundamentals that every racing sailor should know, and set the stage for future discussions. The youth sailors had lots of good questions.

Watch the full video, or use the timings in the video description to go directly to the topics that interest you. Also, visit links below for more information about these topics.

Outline and Video Timings

Introductions
- Good clip showing 49er FX sailing
Points of sail – brief review (03:50)
How to win races (05:10)
- Three fundamentals
- Strategy vs. tactics – what’s the difference?
Understand the venue and the wind to develop a game plan (07:15)
- Types of venues
- Types of wind
- Reading the wind on the water
- Examples with pictures
Wind shifts and sailing in phase (19:15)
- Lifted and headed tack
- Tack on the shifts to sail the shortest distance
- Gains in lifts and headers – with GPS tracking examples
- Ladder rungs – brief intro
Q&A break (30:14)
What is the long tack/long gybe and why does it matter? (38:10)
Tacking angles and laylines (41:04)
- What is a tacking angle?
- What is a layline?
- How to tell when you’re on the layline
- Avoiding the laylines when it’s shifty
More Q&A (46:50)
- What to do if you’re stuck in a header
- Should you tack right away in a knock
- What kind of workouts do you do?
- After a bad start, how do you keep your mind clear?