Race Strategy & Tactics
Starts, shifts and the decisions that win races
Most places offshore are not lost to a faster boat. They are lost to a slower decision: a start on the wrong end, a shift ignored, a fleet followed when it should have been left.
This section is about those decisions. It covers starting, from choosing the favoured end to why winning the crossing can lose you the race, and the tactics that follow: playing the shifts, sailing your own race rather than following the leader, surfing for speed downwind, clean spinnaker drops at the leeward mark and the racing rules when they get complicated.
Two ideas run through all of it. The first is that offshore racing is an obstacle course of tide, headlands, wind holes and other boats, and the crew that has thought about the obstacles in advance makes better calls when it reaches them. The second is that speed is still the foundation. Tired sails, a dirty bottom and the wrong angle cost places that no tactic can win back.
None of it is theory. It comes from more than 200 RORC offshore races since 1971 and 14 Fastnets, and from coaching crews who wanted to know why they kept finishing behind boats they should have beaten.
The test of every idea here is simple: does it gain places over a whole race, in the hands of a tired crew? If it does not, it is folklore.
The articles are listed below, newest first. Explore the other subjects in the FirstShift article library, or read the latest articles.
