USING CRITICAL DECISION POINTS

There are definable points in a race when it’s good to momentarily shift your focus from boatspeed to strategy.

MIKE INGHAM

I used to lose regattas because of one very bad race. When Mother Nature pitched straight, I did great, but when she pitched a curveball, I whiffed. I needed a way to see the curveball coming, a reliable way to recognize those inevitable times when my plan goes wrong. “Critical decision points” is the process I now use to check strategy on the fly. To illustrate, let’s relive a painful example of when I whiffed. I recall vividly a day that my strategy was to go hard left to hook into a geographic lefty. The first race went according to plan; I got a good start near the pin, held my lane to the left corner, got the nice header and tacked. I crossed the fleet riding that lefty to…

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Sailing World (Digital) - 1 Issue, Spring 2023

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