Fast helming is all about balance and finding easy speed, as Andy Beadsworth explains to Andy Rice
According to Andy Beadsworth, when you’re helming the boat you’re not so much steering as ‘applying load to the tiller’. “Sometimes the boat heels over and the load comes on to the tiller or wheel, but you want to keep going in a straight line.
So as the helmsman you have to resist the load coming on if you want to keep the boat tracking in a straight line, or sometimes you go with the load and let it help you turn the boat, either luffing or bearing away, depending on your aims at the time.”
The bigger the boat, the bigger the loads, and the more the steering comes down to the efforts of the entire team, where the helmsman is the conductor who has the final say over the music that the orchestra is playing. Here are five of Andy’s best tips on the finer points of accurate, race-winning steering technique:
1 DON’T FIGHT THE BOAT
Accurate steering is mostly dependent on achieving the correct balance of the boat achieved through boat heel and sail trim. The thing I’ve learned from steering J-Class boats like Velsheda is you’ve got to allow the boat to go in the direction you want it to go in and stop it going in the direction you don’t want it to go.
2 FIND YOUR EASY SPEED
One of the most important thing s is to have ‘easy speed’. It’s not necessarily your ultimate speed that’s important. Wherever possible, it needs to be easy, easy speed when you’re racing. When you’re sailing with flat sails with a tight leech, the groove is very, very narrow. We all know that full and twisted setups have got a wide groove and if you’ve got the space to be able to sail like that it’s a much less stressful mode to operate in. When you’re racing against 50 other boats on a busy race track, you need to be able to pull the sails in and for the boat to go fast straight away. With hard and tight leeches, everything is quite precise and demanding. I find when we do well it’s when we’ve got ‘easy speed’ when the boat just wants to go.
3 STEERING TO CHANGE
Quite often in the race it’s not really about going fast, it’s about sailing modes – being able to go fast in lifts towards the next header, or position your boat against another slightly differently just by changing the mode you’re sailing rather than sailing as fast as you
