Thirteen ways to go faster offshore

by Stuart Greenfield, Yacht Racing Performance Coach
After enough miles offshore, the kind where the watch system stops feeling fresh around day two and the decisions start to blur — you stop pushing for every last tenth of a knot because looking after the team and keeping the spirit and energy up is so much more important than everything else.

Most boats don’t lose significant ground because something goes catastrophically wrong. They lose it because that constant push for trimming and speed drifts. Sheets are cleated and attention drift to snacks and sleep. And over 200 to 600 miles, that’s more than enough.

This is what makes offshore racing genuinely difficult to coach, and difficult to self-diagnose. The problems aren’t obvious. They don’t announce themselves. They accumulate in small, politely invisible ways — a degree of heel, half a knot through a transition, a sail change held fifteen minutes too long, a watch handover that lost ten minutes of focus — and by the time you’re plotting your positions in the morning a lot of those AIS plots have disappeared. Are you miles ahead or miles behind? – Full report