No sense of place or time

Today was spectacular. After a frustrating week at work, I was ready to strangle someone. Since that's not really acceptable, I was looking forward to being aggressive on the water.

We began with 3,5,7 windward leeward tack and gybe drill. My tacks were going well and I was flattening the boat quickly. The gybes felt rusty and need work. I was also overshooting the windward mark a lot.

Then we did the spin drill with a 360 round the middle mark. This was chaotic, but went reasonably well.

Particularly memorable was when we were doing practice starts and short races. I was finding a good position and accelerating well. The only problem was that I was over early most of the time. We had a lot of general recalls, but there were times when I was over early and we just kept going. I think there were also times I thought I was over early but wasn't. In any case, I was accelerating well and maintaining speed over the course. I beat every one in one race, including about 5 full rigs. I was consistently beating the radials and some of the full rigs. I was a little concerned that being over early was an unfair advantage, but the coaches seemed to think I was sailing well and the advantage couldn't be maintained if I wasn't. They were glad to see me being so aggressive as last year I was consistently getting buried. It's partly a matter of the mood I was in today, but it is also due to increased confidence in boat handling and starting. The over early stuff was simply because 10 seconds is longer than I think, and the boat accelerates quicker than I think. Maybe my sense of place and time was thrown off by the fact that yesterday I was in the office in Calgary and this morning I landed in Victoria and was on the water before 11am. I mean, it's a whole different time zone out here!

We also did an interesting partner drill. At the windward mark, one boat was to sail the layline and the other was to tack in to lee-bow that boat. I was partnered with Max and I'm not sure that we got the positioning right even once, but I get the idea. If you are tacking in and can't get on the lay line, leebowing someone is the way to go. It should push you out in front of them and if done outside of 2 boat length circle, gives you the right to push the windward boat up so that you can shoot the mark and take the inside. The downwind leg was about speed control. Generally I was rounding windward better and was faster downwind than Max. I gave him feedback on vang and mainsheet but I still had to sheet in or over steer to slow down. At the downwind mark we were to approach side by side and the outside boat was to slow down enough to pull in behind the inside boat and then hopefully squeeze up coming out of the rounding to get upwind of the inside boat. Very good practice and a great demonstration of just how much this matters. I need to work on rounding tighter. The problem was mostly gybing too late and not approaching the mark close hauled. I need to think back to Noah's drill from the summer and position myself accordingly. On the upwind leg, we were to cross tacks and port tack boat was to duck starboard. This was frustrating as we often went too long on each tack or had interference from other boats. Max capsized at least 4 times during this drill. Usually I was coming out ahead on the crosses. This lead me to try to slow down which meant sloppy sailing. Let the boat heel, the the sheet out, that's all slow. This is a better drill if you have well matched partners.