It's no accident

From The Helm

When a journalist called South African golfer, Gary Player, “lucky” because he sank a chip from off the green to win a tournament, Player replied, “It’s funny, but the more I practice, the luckier I get.”

I was reminded of that quote at Sail Sydney as I was leaving the media centre just on dark. As we packed away our laptops and cameras, Nathan Outteridge came around the corner with his Moth. He had done three races in strong winds in his 49er and had then gone out for over two hours to sail the Moth.

So it was no major surprise when Nathan convincingly won the Moth Worlds at Lake Macquarie in January (see page 20) and went on to become King of Docklands in the SB3 (see page 16). He’s not only an immensely talented sailor, he also spends many hours honing that talent.

Andrew Verdon explains the science behind “training harder” in his Fit for Sailing column (page 52) where he says you need 10,000 hours of quality practice to master a skill. The key word is “quality” and Michael Blackburn expands on this with some suggested skill sets on page 56.

This magazine is always about improving your sailing skills, but this issue celebrates it even more than usual, with lots of “how to” articles but also many stories in the Nationals feature and elsewhere about the best sailors in the country and often the world.

One of the many pleasures of my job is that I often get to watch world champion sailors plying their trade. I’ve certainly improved my own sailing skills from having done so.

But just as you can’t learn to run a marathon by reading a book about it, you won’t become a better sailor just by watching others or even just by reading the pages of this magazine, although I certainly hope that will help!

To master the craft you need to get out there and do it at every opportunity.

That’s one reason why I encourage readers to enter regattas like Audi Victoria Week and the upcoming Audi Sydney Harbour Regatta or to go to the state and national championships for their chosen class.

On the first day of a race week, especially if the wind is up, it’s quite comical watching the cruising-withspinnaker divisions and some of the smaller boat crews struggling with their drops and hoists. But six days later, after anything up to 10 or 12 races, the crew work is slick and some of the early back-markers are up there challenging the guns.

By doing the same thing day after day, they develop their routine. They understand what the bloke next to them needs. And they have made all the mistakes and know how to avoid them, or at least how to fix things quickly if something does go wrong. The good news is that once you’ve thoroughly learned the skills, they stay with you for life.

I know that Glenn Bourke doesn’t get out racing as often as he would like. But put him on an SB3 or in the cockpit of Wild Oats XI and all the old skills are right there to hand, as he proved in Docklands in January.

It was the same when my predecessor as editor, Vanessa Dudley, decided to make a come-back to competitive racing in the Laser. All those years of sailing up and down the course at the highest level and in a variety of boats had imprinted themselves on her brain, and in her muscle memory. That’s why she can still win Laser races against the kids.

So if you can take a week off to go yacht racing, do it as often as possible. Use the time to improve your skills. Read the collective wisdom of all the champions who write for this magazine and then put it into practice. Absorb it, apply it, and do it over and over until it becomes second nature.

In my opinion, any form of sailing is fun. But the most fun of all is looking over your shoulder at the rest of the fleet and hearing that gun go off as you cross the finish line.