RS Tera National Squads 25/26 Weekend 3 - Rutland SC

Weekend 3 at Rutland shifted the focus from tacital sailing where the squad previously worked on when to overtake and how to stay ahead to mindset across different race formats. With the recent confirmation of the new Olympic-style regatta structure, this weekend was about how sailors think on the water, within the traditional format and the new format.

What we worked on

We looked at two ways races can be structured:

• Traditional – series of races with a discard

• Olympic-style – shorter series then a final race that decides the overall result

The difference isn’t just procedural — it changes how you prepare, assess risk, and adjust you actions between races.

Pre-race info intake

On the Saturday morning, we had a long class room session due to lack of wind, where we practised a simple but powerful framework for gathering useful pre-start information:

1. Environment – wind, pressure systems, sea breeze cues

2. Fleet & Course – biases, favoured sides, leverage

3. Type of Day – stable, shifts, oscillations, or random patterns

The goal is clarity quickly — especially when time ashore is short as well as the time afloat whilst sailing to the race course.

Quality familiarisation, not quantity

Rather than long warm ups that feel busy and unfocused, sailors practised:

• short bursts of targeted observation either with structured support from coaches or individually

• intentional trigger pulls linked to what they expect on the course

This built sharper pattern recognition before racing.

Racing takeaways

Traditional format: Race 1 became an information race — what did we learn that we can use immediately in Race 2? Top performers treated early races as data collection and 'counting results', not just results.

Olympic-style mindset: With fewer qualifiers and a decisive final, sailors explored when to push for gain and when to protect position. There’s less margin for error, so decisions must be clearer.

Thank you to the squad for their hard work over the winter training block and it felt weird over the weekend to be signing off the Performance Academy in January but we have covered a lot of useful content to help prepare sailors for the season ahead. Thank you for the support from both Finlay and Sam in the coaching team.

For questions or extra insight, get in touch at dylan@apexsailing.co.uk or follow @apex_sailing on Instagram and Facebook.