How to Sail To Your Handicap Rating

Big or small, the priority at the New York YC’s ORC Worlds was a clean start and clear air.The 2024 ORC World Championship will include a mix of buoy racing and offshore courses testing the mettle of all competitors. This ORC World Championship is incorporating the Maxi North American Championship [ORC]. ©Paul Todd/OUTSIDEIMAGES.COM Paul Todd/ Outside Images/ NYYC

Recently I raced the American YC Spring Series on a Swan 42 with some childhood friends. This regatta was a three-day event, with a coastal race and windward-leeward races. There were 46 boats of a variety of shapes and sizes, and the format gave me plenty to think about when it comes to the fundamentals of handicap racing.

As with any type of racing, success on the course starts with what we do before we leave the dock. The Swan 42 team is a well-organized program with good leadership and communication. We saw the fruits of that in the week before racing, with emails outlining the boat prep, the sails we would have on board, the weather and conditions we can expect, the relative handicaps in our fleet, and what shoreside activities to plan for.

Not all teams are this well-­organized, particularly when it comes to early-season ­regattas, and even we had some struggles before sailing. On the first day, for example, we left the dock without the medium jib, which became an issue when the breeze came up. We fixed that oversight the following day, but we then created a new problem by mistakingly bringing the old medium practice jib.

Essentially, we created a ­challenge for ourselves the first two days of the Spring Series by not utilizing a thorough checklist. And we failed to follow the adage I like to use: “same ­people, same jobs.”

If the same two people are responsible for the day’s sail inventory, mistakes can be reduced, and that means loading the sails and double-­checking them before leaving the dock. This rule can be applied to docking: Same sailor does the stern line, same sailor does the fenders. Before going sailing, the same sailor hooks up the main halyard, runs the kite sheets, etc. The habit of reducing mistakes with a checklist and keeping consistency with jobs is a safe and efficient way to ensure that you’re ready to race when the sails go up.

Know your strengths

Before we even talk about what happens on the racecourse, every owner should take the time to understand the handicap system under which they’re racing. Regardless of the rating system, you can set yourself up for success by building a reliable set of target speed and angles for your boat. These targets are available online for most types of racing sailboats. Because ORC is a VPP-based handicap, you can purchase the ORC Speed Guide for your boat (found at orc.org), which is a comprehensive set of theoretical targets that are based on the ORC VPP for your boat. You can use the ORC Speed Guide as a set of targets, but also as a reference to how well you sail your boat relative to your handicap.

There are many avenues to explore to optimize your boat for a particular handicap system, and that process should start with reviewing the accuracy of the data that goes into your rating. One piece of low-hanging fruit is to remeasure your sails, because they shrink with age. Bring them into your local sailmaker and have them get new measurements so that your rating reflects shrinkage in girths and sail areas.

Own your rating

Once on the course, the challenge of handicap racing is to sail your boat as close to your targets as possible, sailing tight turns around the track with minimal extra distance sailed. Understanding the strengths and limitations of your competition is the key to doing this successfully. For example, if there is a big cruiser in your fleet, you are probably safe starting to windward because they probably can’t point very well. Another boat might have symmetric kites with a pole, so you know they will sail lower than you downwind if you are on an asymmetric.

In our ORC class of seven boats at the Spring Series, the aforementioned Swan 42 was roughly the second-fastest boat in light air, and somewhere in the middle of the pack in medium to strong conditions. This was reflected in the handicaps that would cross over depending on the wind band. ORC sees the Swan 42 as a boat that’s fast upwind and points well. So this was a strong hand for us to play off the starting line, provided our timing and approach was good. We worked hard on being fast for the first 2 ­minutes off the start line, as that is when individual boats show their weaknesses. Most teams come off the starting line sailing below targets because they are late trimming, pulling on the jib halyard, backstay, cunningham, outhaul, etc. This tends to be true early in the season. We found that the best way to optimize for our target speed off the line was to do a quick upwind session at about 6 ­minutes before the start, check our upwind settings in the same breeze we are about to race in, get final compass numbers, then bear away and enter the start zone.

Starts are relatively easy when you are the bigger or faster boat of the fleet. Not only do you have a more effective acceleration, but smart sailors on the small boats also work hard to not start anywhere near you. When you are the smaller or slower boat, however, there are ways to get a good start, get going the right way, and sail to targets.

Here’s an example: In the 2024 season in Newport, I raced on the Botin 44 Interlodge. We were usually the fastest-rated boat in our class. Once we got off the start, clear air found us and no one dictated our path. If we started clean and went the right way, we were hard to beat. However, there was one event that provided a different challenge for us. The Queens Cup is a perpetual trophy race with one fleet sailing the same course—usually a long windward-leeward or triangle. In last year’s Queens Cup, we had one Maxi 72, four ORC 52s, and a well-sailed 74-foot sloop to contend with. They were all significantly faster than us. We knew we had to stay away from the bigger and faster boats on the start.

Most of the fleet milled around beyond the race-committee signal boat and let the Maxi 72 and the 52s have their way with the start line. It seemed as though three-quarters of the fleet was planning to start to the right end of the line and tack for clear air. That turned the lower right side of the first beat into a high-density area. However, in the building sea breeze on Rhode Island Sound, the left usually has more pressure. So, we knew that if we could start and go straight on starboard to the left, we might do pretty well.

We decided to go down in a blaze of glory, be aggressive, and win the pin against the big boats. The bigger boats were all involved in their own skirmishes, and everyone was afraid of the 72, so that freed us up to nail the start at the favored pin end.

What played out surprised me at the time, but in hindsight, it makes sense. The Maxi 72 blasted off the middle of the line, higher and faster, as did one of the 52s to windward of us. The other four big boats were jammed up, sailing off target, and eventually had to tack away.

Because the pin was so favored, the 72 and the 52 didn’t get to our breeze until more than 3 minutes after the start. Just before we felt their gas, we tacked onto port, got a bonus lift from the breeze off the backs of their very big sails, and settled in on a long port tack, with the majority of the 17-boat fleet now tucked in to leeward. By protecting the favored left, we got the pressure first, had a clean lane, and even managed to beat a couple of the biggies to the top mark.

The lesson learned: On an even racecourse, and on a slower boat, starting to the right and tacking can be good if clear air is the priority. But be careful not to give up too much line bias or course bias in the process—that can be a big deficit from which to recover.

Saving time on the run

As difficult as it can be sailing against different-rated boats upwind, the downwind legs can get very tricky with the variety of sailing angles in the fleet.

Back to AYC’s Spring Series: In light air, we all sailed roughly the same angles, but the Swan 42 is a relatively heavy boat with a lot of righting moment, so we had midfleet speed downwind. In 12-plus knots of true-wind speed, three shorter and lighter boats in our fleet could plane downwind much faster than us. The only thing we could do was ease the kite sheet and sail as low as possible.

That made for interesting tactics downwind. If we started well and sailed well, we would beat the small boats to the top mark, but before they come roaring by, we could either jibe early for clear air and keep starboard advantage at the next cross farther down the leg, or let them roll us and then prevent them from jibing to port on layline. If they were fast enough to cross, we could also jibe on their wind for the long port tack into the leeward mark, which would slow them a bit while still sailing to our target angles.

The most important thing for us to remember was that we are always racing the clock, in a sense. So, we had to be careful not to sail extra distance or extra elapsed time just to slow down a smaller boat. We had to remain focused on sailing our target speed as much as possible and pulling the string tight around the track (not sailing extra distance).

Banking time on the second beat 

Assuming we get to the bottom gates as efficiently as possible, the game then becomes how to manage the second beat with the same efficiency. Sailing the shortest distance as fast as possible is still the goal. And as a bigger/faster boat, perhaps we can set up so that the competition is forced to either sail in our gas or go the wrong way to clear their air.

At the Spring Series regatta, there were multiple fleets on our course, so once we got on the second beat, there was plenty of upwind and downwind traffic to deal with. That meant choosing the leeward gate that would take us to the better of the two corners. The legs were short, and in half of them, we “­one-tacked” the leg, going all the way to layline to reduce the number of tacks and staying out of the disturbed air from the other fleets.

This can be a good play in a handicap fleet to save time on the track if you’re confident in your layline call. In fact, sometimes going to the wrong side of the course on one tack is better than doing multiple tacks through the dirty air in the middle.

The bigger boats get to dictate how the second beat plays out, but the little boats do have a few plays available if they are smart. If I’m racing upwind on a smaller and slower boat, for example, I will try to approach the top mark five to eight boatlengths below either layline. This is a powerful lane where you can often find clear air as the bigger/faster boats cross ahead. They are closer to the top of the diamond and will sail past your wind and do their final tack on the layline to the mark. They’ll leave you clean and fast, and hopefully they’ll overstand the mark. If they choose to tack directly on you to slow you down, you simply tack away, leaving them having done the same number of tacks or more.

Calculate but don’t complicate

If you have time before the sailing day, study the handicap deltas across the fleet and get a sense of how much time you need to beat a smaller boat, or how close you have to finish to the big boats in order to beat them. Many windward-leeward races are roughly 60 minutes, so I like to write out in my notebook a simple chart that shows how much time is owed in 60 minutes of sailing.

For example, if we need to beat a smaller boat by 3 minutes in a 60-minute race, then I know that I need to be about a minute to a minute and a half ahead at the first leeward gate or halfway point. If the race is only 45 to 50 minutes, I scrub off some of that time in my head so that I have a general idea because it might dictate how we want to sail the boat.

Ultimately, I prefer to leave the handicapping to the race committee and simply sail the boat as fast as possible and close to the targets. Pull the string tight around the track and know what your opposite tack or jibe angle is on the compass so that you can go to an early layline to save the maneuvers. You are racing the clock, and simply sailing your boat well will get you the results you seek.

The post How to Sail To Your Handicap Rating appeared first on Sailing World.