You can take the RS400 out of the Endeavour Trophy, but it seems you can't take the Endeavour Trophy out of the RS400 sailor. This was Nick Craig's third consecutive victory in the Champion of Champions' event at Burnham-on-Crouch. Admittedly he has been the OK representative in the past (last year he could have been the OK or RS400 representative and he chose the singlehander), but this year he returned to his RS400 roots. Behind Nick and his crew James Stewart were brother and sister reps in the RS200, Roger and Katrina Gilbert. Nick and Roger are virtual blood brothers. They have both won the Endeavour, they've both won the RS400 Nationals (actually Roger has won it four times), and they both come from a piddly little pond in Surrey called Frensham Pond Sailing Club.

Over the years that piddly little pond has produced some of the greatest dinghy sailing talent in the UK. I've only sailed there a couple of times in my school days, and it was enough to drive you up the wall. Surrounded on nearly every side by tall trees, the wind swirls in every possible direction, all at the same time. "It's a very hard place to sail," agrees Roger. "It makes you very good at reacting to things. You've got to anticipate all the time, it's a very different kind of sailing to almost everything else I do but I like to go back there to practise."

Roger says that it helps him speed up his reaction time such that when he gets back to more ‘normal' sailing, everything seems so much easier. I know what he means, because I discovered the same thing after spending three years' team racing at university. You have to be so on your wits to anticipate the next move and to react to your opponent's move in an instant, that when you get back into the more predictable patterns of fleet racing it's like you're racing in slow motion. It seems like you have all the time in the world to make the next decision.

The other nice thing about team racing is that boatspeed has very little to do with the outcome - indeed it's often the team that is best at sailing the slowest that often ends up winning the race! Roger says that boatspeed has very little to do with the outcome of any fleet racing at Frensham Pond either. "It's all about where you go. You could be sailing a slower boat but if you pick the right side of the beat and get the best windshifts you could end up sailing half the distance."
 
Roger says the fickleness of Frensham makes you very sensitive to ‘feeling' the wind, developing a sixth sense for what the wind is doing. Perhaps this explains why such a little club has churned out so much talent over the years. But it's only part of the story. "When Nick and I were sailing Cadets we would do a minimum of five races every weekend, with a minimum of three laps per race. Each lap consisted of eight marks, so that's 24 mark roundings per race, 120 mark roundings per weekend. And you might do 15 or 20 tacks in just one beat, for example, so you get all this really concentrated boathandling practice."

When Roger goes back to Frensham now he doesn't see the same intensity of racing going on in the Cadet fleet. In fact he hardly sees any Cadets at the club at all. "They're all in some sort of RYA squad, a Zone Squad or a Regional Squad or whatever. They're all off round the country doing training somewhere. When I was doing Cadets there were perhaps the top 20 teams at the most who were in the National Squad. Everyone else sailed out of their clubs. But the RYA has killed that off."

Roger admits there are some advantages to the squad system, "more training, more structure, and probably being trained by someone who knows what they're talking about". But it does seem a shame that club racing at youth level has suffered, not to mention the parents who must put thousands of miles on their Volvo estate cars as they drive up and down the country every weekend.

Roger and Nick never went through the Squad system and they've certainly turned out OK. Considering that, it's surprising just how focused and professional they are in their approach to their racing. Roger learned this from sailing his Laser at Stokes Bay Sailing Club during the mid-Nineties when virtually every good Laser sailor was based there, as they trained up for the Olympic Trials before the 1996 Games. I spent a bit of time in that group myself, subjecting myself to ritual humiliation by the likes of Ben Ainslie, Iain Percy and Hugh Styles. But as Roger says, you couldn't help but improve in that sort of environment. "I did rubbish, but learned a lot," Roger admits. "With Lasers you have to concentrate very hard to get to the front of the fleet, you work to lift every bow over the wave, then you turn round and work harder downwind. If you compare that level with a standard fleet like an Enterprise or RS400, they're relatively static in their body movements. So if you take the intensity of Laser sailing into another class, you should do very well."

The other eye-opener at the Stokes Bay Laser scene was how little emphasis there was on conventional racing, a contrast to what Roger had done in his Cadet days at Frensham. "We hardly did any racing, just a lot of training runs, working on specific techniques," Roger recalls. "It was a whole different approach to improving your sailing." Gradually he shifted his attention away from the Laser towards the RS400. He dabbled for the first year but when he teamed up with James Stewart (yes, the same James Stewart that also crews for Nick Craig) he started to get serious about the 400. Roger and Nick started doing lots of two-boat tuning and practice drills together, which was unheard of in a class like the RS400 and is probably considered by some as tantamount to treason! Practice is cheating, after all!

The things that Roger and Nick discovered during all their two-boat testing were a little surprising. They were expecting to discover some magic new rig settings, but actually they were using exactly the same rig settings at the end of the season as they were using at the beginning of the season before all the experimentation began. "We're both fairly smart blokes so we had a reasonable idea of what to do the rig I suppose," says Roger. "But we did get a lot faster, and we both ended up quite a bit faster than the rest of the RS400 fleet." He puts this down to simply getting better at the raw sailing of the boat - hiking it harder, sailing it flatter, steering the waves more effectively. "When you're two-boat testing as much as we were, you've got an instant benchmark of what works and what doesn't."

One thing that Roger is an absolute stickler for is sailing the boat flat, and he means flat. We've all heard that that's what we should do, and yet Roger believes very few people put it into practice. "I think that's one of the differences in the way that Nick and I sail compared with most people in the RS200 or RS400 fleets. I sail the boat until it almost feels like it's coming on top of me. I like to sail the boat with neutral feel in the tiller, whereas most people like the comfort factor of a bit of weather helm." The funny thing was, soon after interviewing Roger I opened up the recent edition of Yachts & Yachting with the Endeavour Trophy report. If you go there, look for the start line picture, and who should be leaning over at an alarming angle but the Topper Xenon with an RS200 sticker on its bow! But I believe you, Roger. I'm sure that was a rare moment of heel caught on camera.

The other skill that Roger believes came about through all that two-boat training was the ability to sail the fine line between gaining depth downwind without falling off the plane. "That's what the RS400 and RS200 are all about - sailing as deep as you can for as long as you can while keep the boat planing. As soon as you can feel the boat beginning to lose speed, you luff up to keep it on the boil." And when Roger talks about luffing up, he means doing it with only the minimum of rudder movement. "You let the boat heel away from you a bit, sheet in the mainsail, change of the balance of the boat to change the steering. That requires a huge amount of crew and helm coordination."

To get to the front of a fleet like the RS400 or 200, these are the subtle sort of skills you need to master. So no wonder RS representatives have performed so well at the Endeavour in recent years, even with the change to the class-neutral Xenon. Roger doesn't think it's so much the RS400 class per se, more the fact that during the late 90s/early 2000s the RS400 was the hottest class to be in. These days he thinks the balance of power has shifted to the RS200, which certainly has the biggest turnouts in doublehanded hiking-out classes, and to some extent the Laser SB3. "The Laser SB3 has attracted some of the best sailors from the national dinghy fleets. If you look at the finishing order of this year's Nationals - Geoff Carveth, Mike Budd, myself, and Chris Jennings in 4th place - we've all come out of the RS400 fleet. But it's not about the RS400, it's about those sort of sailors wanting the best competition we can find. Guys like Jim Hunt and Geoff Carveth go wherever they can find the biggest, most competitive fleets, whether it's the Enterprise, the GP14, the RS400 or whatever. You may not even like the boat that much, but it's about going for the competition more than the boat."

More recently Roger has been sailing a 49er with Olivier Vidal, and they have finished in the top 30 at the past two World Championships. When you think that virtually everyone else in the top 50 is full-time professional, that's no mean feat. Roger loves the boat, but reckons he's got as far as he can in an Olympic fleet whilst holding down a day job. So he's on the prowl for another challenge. Next year it could be helming a 14, crewing a Fireball, or helming a Merlin. "I really like sailing with James [Stewart], and we could race a Merlin together," he says. "The only trouble is, I rang up Winder the other day to find out about buying a boat and the waiting list runs until June!" Roger acknowledges that there are some very fast wooden Merlin boatbuilders out there, but says he wants the idle simplicity of a plastic boat, and for that he needs a Winder. "I love wooden boats, but I don't have the time or inclination to spend the time looking after them."