CREWING
Author: David Carter
I have been doing quite a bit of crewing lately, for Laurence both on the Tiger and the RS 200.
It has reminded me how challenging, satisfying and good fun crewing can be. You can really make a big contribution to the performance of the boat as a crew. It’s not just a matter of pulling all the right strings at the front of the boat; calling distance off at the start, balancing and trimming the boat, maintaining an overview of the boat set up and sail trim, doing tactics upwind, calling lay lines can leave the helmsman with little more to do than get a good start and concentrate on sailing fast.
There is one other thing a really good crew will do. The importance of this is often under-estimated and very few crews are really good at this. What you have to remember is that when something goes wrong, particularly if it has clearly and completely been caused by the helmsman’s stupidity and incompetence – IT IS TOTALLY YOUR FAULT! ACCEPT THE BLAME WITHOUT QUESTION!!
Even if you have performed all your other crewing duties impeccably, failure to do this can totally ruin your race. If your helmsman trips over his toe strap during a tack falling into the bottom of the boat while he slams the tiller over leaving the main sheet cleated resulting in the boat coming out of the tack stopped, near capsized and on a broad reach, a good crew’s immediate response should be “Really sorry I didn’t cross the boat fast enough”. If you are an exceptional crew and you are confident you can avoid even the slightest hint of sarcasm you could go for “Nice tack! Sorry I messed up” but this is only for top crews, if your helmsman thinks you are being smart all is lost.
All too often I hear crews responding to a situation like that by saying something like “What the hell are you playing at!!” Saying that is a complete disaster, you might as well give up and go home straight away. Your helmsman is now no longer trying to win the race, his main focus will be to demonstrate that you are completely incompetent at tacking the boat and because you won’t listen to him all your tacks are bad.
If you can cheerfully take the blame for anything that does not go according to plan you are more than half way to winning. If however you are not totally successful at accepting the blame and you don’t win, make sure that everyone in the dinghy park after the race knows that it was entirely your fault and that it was only because of your helmsman’s amazing skills that you managed to finish at all.
A top tip is to use old control lines to make a multi tailed whip to keep in your kit bag. If you don’t get the result your helmsman was hoping for, a thorough dose of post race dinghy park self flagellation will go a long way to enhance your reputation as a crew.
Crewing really can be great fun, just don’t forget who gets the credit and who gets the blame.
