One of the reasons why it is so hard to improve your racing is that sailing is such a time-intensive sport. If you are running, you can start your training session fi ve minutes after you’ve shut your front door, whereas it may take a sailor fi ve hours (or more) to drive to the venue, fully rig the boat and get on the water. This is why full-time sailors have such an advantage over those weekend warriors. If you can sail only at weekends, it can be very unfortunate if there is too much wind to sail on the Saturday and not enough wind on the Sunday, or if, when you can sail, there is no coach available!

The aim of this book is to help those who wish to improve their skills in the shortest time possible. To achieve this you need to assess yourself and then spend your time training in the most effi cient way. You can, after all, improve your sailing by going to the gym or reading (this book) from the comfort of your armchair. Coaching is an extremely important part of learning, but for the vast majority of sailors it is not possible to have a coach all the time. In fact, because of the constraints of time, money and location, many sailors may only have a coach on rare occasions.

This book is for all those busy people who still want to be successful, and need to optimise every hour of every training session without a coach!