Andrew Campbell

Monday Morning Tactician: 27 August 2007 Canoeing Without a Paddle

August 29th, 2007 in Monday Morning Tactician.

After driving from the temperate north and upstate New York to the hot and muggy swamp of the Chesapeake bay, I had the pleasure of taking a step back in time and taking a role as main trimmer and tactician for the Log Canoe Silver Heel and its crew of rag-tag Georgetown sailors and friends. The boats are initially a scary undertaking with their incredible tippy temperament and enormous sailplan. Not to mention the fact that 13 of us scrambled around the pencil-like craft. Six of those would be exclusively climbing out on three boards wedged in the leeward rail, hanging over the water to windward. Putting the 65-foot tree-trunk masts up in the morning before sailing takes ten people, and can be a potentially dangerous affair without properly focused effort. Furthermore, if you turn over, and we did, the masts must be swum out from the hull before the boat can be righted.

What was to be learned this weekend was essentially patience. There are a few things to be learned from a weekend of sailing a new boat, much less a new class can translate to everyone. One: leadership and organization ensures fun for everybody. Two: specific roles and their descriptions are critical to staying out of trouble. And three: knowing your limits can usually prevent disaster, but sticking to fundamentals will ensure success.

The first two points of this column are very closely connected. Good leadership is necessary for any successful program, and a weekend of sailboat racing is no exception. Unfortunately, a quick weekend of sailing often sacrifices leadership for numbers. Delegation of roles on the boat and responsibilities for all aspects of racing are easy preventatives to potential problems. The person in charge does not have to be the most experienced or best sailor of the group, but simply the most aware of the common problem spots and pitfalls of the particular boat your sailing. Once that person has taken charge of the situation, the responsibilities should be clearly assigned to people, by name, preferably in front of the entire group. This ensures that everybody is on the same page and knows which member of the crew to turn to with questions and issues. Delegation of responsibility ensures better efficiency throughout the weekend by preventing thousands questions being shot at the team leader. Likewise, it usually prevents micromanagement by that team leader and enables him or her to focus on his own job. (Silver Heel #2 with the red shirts)

The best way to delegate responsibility is to directly assign the roles of the boat ahead of time. For instance, on the log canoe, we had one jib trimmer, one foresail trimmer, two board throwers for each board (six total for the three boards), two floaters adding to board weight and dealing with the staysail and centerboard, one mainsail trimmer and tactician, and one helmsman. By pointing out which of the sailors are going where and discussing how to perform each maneuver ahead of time will save you a world of time on the water. There will always be questions during every maneuver, but delegating particular people as managers of their areas on the boat ensures that the skipper can focus on driving. Most often, keeping the helmsman cool and confident is the most important piece to the puzzle of success. The tacticians therefore find themselves fielding most of the questions from the sailors as well as making the vocal calls to prepare the team for the upcoming maneuvers and possible consequences of those actions. Speaking in direct terms is the smartest and most efficient way to get your point across: “We’re going to sail into a lull here… Nick will be the first to come off the boards, then Mac, then Pete.” By using names and reaffirming the roles of those sailors, this creates a smaller chance for mistakes.

Even after you’ve discussed roles and talked through the maneuvers, there are still limits to the reaction times and skill-sets of any team. Knowing those limits can prevent you from making potential disasters. All teams with more than one sailor on board demand communication going around the racecourse, and usually one calm, steady voice making those calls is enough to overcome any questions. Making the proper calls on the racecourse demands a fair amount of anticipation of future moves necessary of the helmsman. Tacticians and navigators are specifically necessary to make the calls in order to talk the rest of the crew through maneuvers that are about to happen, thus ensuring nobody is taken by surprise when turns need to be made on the racecourse. We got in trouble this weekend on a gybe that we hadn’t spent enough time talking about before we started turning the boat. In retrospect, we could have easily avoided turning over had we talked through the gybe once more before we actually turned the boat. Knowing that the team was inexperienced we should have realized its limited ability to be confident enough in their roles to throw in a quick gybe.

Happily there were twelve smiles floating around the Tred Avon river this weekend (barring those who were being stung by jellyfish). There were enough good sailors on board to realize that turning over is just one of those things that happens to fresh teams. The rest of us were happy to cool off after sailing around in 100 degree temperatures all day. More importantly, the group improved individually and wholly as the weekend went on. We were 6th or 7th in the first race of the 9 boats present, and coming back, passing the 4th place boat when we turned over in race 2. By the third race of the weekend, we nearly rolled the 2nd place boat into the finish and took 3rd before heading in and packing up. Without a doubt there we learned our fair share of lessons, not to mention a lot about each other and how to best approach our team atmosphere. There is no doubt we had it clicking by the third race, and look forward to putting it together for another weekend.

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