OCSC's "Learn-to-Race" course

A.K.A. Performance 2, this extension of our popular Spinnaker 101A course is designed to teach sailors with basic spinnaker handling and performance sailing experience the advanced maneuvers and skills so critical on a race course. We'll cover everything from mark rounding skills to exotic spinnaker hoists and douses, as well as all manner of downgear sailing techniques so necessary for starting and safely ducking starboard tackers.

Topics Covered:

• The team concept in sailing
• Working the boat upwind for speed-waves, puffs, crew weight, shifting gears
• Advanced spinnaker sets (the set/gybe, the gybe/set, the windward set)
• Advanced spinnaker work (steering with crew weight, pumping the helm and sheet to promote surfing)
• Windward spinnaker douses
• The leeward mark tactical rounding (the J-turn)
• Responding to wind shifts
• Safely ducking other vessels
• Tactical tacking (maximizing upwind advantage, preventing foil stalling, accelerating out of the tack)
• Quick acceleration and deceleration techniques at the start
• Efficient and quick penalty turns

Successful completion prepares you to:

• Sail a J/24 from all positions in full race mode, and leave the course with practice and training tools that would allow you to start building a team to campaign a mid-sized keelboat racing on San Francisco Bay.
• Join a current racing team with a full set of crew skills to allow insertion into a variety of positions immediately.

Good to know:

• Sailing is a team sport and the graduates who have had the most success using this course have hooked up with their classmates for a few post course team practices. Some have stayed together and are racing to this day on boats they bought together! Others have used that refining work to take the next step with a current team on the Bay.
• Since the J/24 is sailed to its potential the entire weekend, the work and maneuvers involved will be absorbing, exciting, fun, but also tiring, so be ready to relax by Sunday afternoon.
• Sailing gloves are always important, but in spinnaker courses they are absolutely necessary.
• The course often plans to take its lunch with it to maximize sailing time, so if being aboard all day without a shore break won't work for you, simply inform the office staff and they will ensure you have a mid-day shore break.