Picking up on my conversation about Fireballs in the last edition of Rolltacks, I was impressed to see that Steve Chesney managed to finish 12th out of 176 in the World Championships, as well as being one of the chief organisers of the event. Steve has crewed for Angus Hemmings for many years now, despite the fact that Angus makes Steve tack facing backwards because, in Steve's words, "Angus is too lazy to reach forward to adjust the jib sheets after a gybe."

Personally, if I was crewing for Angus, I'd tell him where to stick his jib cleats. No, actually, what I mean is I'd tell him where I was going to stick them. Helm telling crew where to put his jib cleats? It's an outrage against the crews' union. I used to hate tacking backwards - it made no sense to me, doing all that twisting around and not seeing where you're going. But I suppose it's horses for courses. Tacking backwards does make some sense if you are particularly tall, for example.

When Pete Newlands starting crewing in the 470, he kept on getting stuck under the boom. At 6'2, his best way of clearing the vang was to tack backwards, but even then it was a struggle. It wasn't until he stumbled in a tack that he found a way through the boat without a struggle. Rather than staying on both feet, he crouched on one knee and this saw him comfortably through the middle of the boat. He went on to win the 470 Worlds crewing for Nigel Buckley, so his technique can't have been too shabby.

It goes to show some of the best discoveries and innovations are made by accident. When we broke our top spreader in the International 14 recently, the rig looked like it was going to crash around our ears, with the gennaker pulling the mast tip alarmingly off to leeward. Having got the kite safely back in the chute and sailing up the next windward leg, we discovered the boat felt quicker in the strong-gusting breeze. So maybe the answer is for us to ease our cap shroud tension upwind when the wind is strong. It's something to try for the future, and it could be we have stumbled by accident across something quite useful.

Having spent my time at the America's Cup Acts in Sweden and Sicily in recent weeks, I've had the opportunity to interview a number of old dinghy friends now earning the big money pulling in big sails. Andy Hemmings was one of them, Angus's more famous brother, (who from memory was a forward-facing tacker in the Dinghy Crewing book that he wrote for the Fernhurst series some 10 or more years ago. Perhaps Steve should point that out to his helmsman...). Other familiar faces include Iain Percy, Ian Walker, Richard Sydenham and Jim Turner.

Jim Turner is sailing for the French K-Challenge, which is not one of the front runners but for a small and less well-funded team is certainly punching above its weight. K-Challenge won one of the fleet races against Alinghi and the 10 other Challengers, which was a great result for a team racing a five-year-old boat. But like any of the smaller teams, the K-Challenge have to take their share of defeats on the chin, particularly in match racing where it's black and white, either win or lose.

What strikes me about America's Cup sailors, however, is how ‘process driven' they are, to borrow one of those terms so favoured by coaches. Most of us part-time, weekend sailors tend to focus on the other sort of goals, ‘outcome goals', ie, the result you get at the end of an open meeting. What us part-timers tend to be not so good at is the reasons why we do or don't perform on a given day. The America's Cup sailors are very good at this. Even when they've lost a match race, they still analyse every part of the race, looking at the bits they did right as well as the things went wrong. "Even when you lose the race you still analyse it the same as if you won it," says Jim.

The other thing that they learn from the racing in these America's Cup Acts is how to make the best of a bad job, to do everything you can to overcome adversity. For example, in one windy match race in Sweden, K-Challenge was leading China Team when their steering chain broke. This is the mechanism that links the twin steering wheels to the rudder. Not surprisingly, breaking such a fundamental piece of equipment is a disaster, but the K-Challenge continued the race by sending two sailors down below decks to steer the boat direct from the steering quadrant. Of course, below decks they couldn't see anything so there was another man on deck, calling out "Up a bit, down a bit" to his team mates downstairs. China Team did manage to overtake K-Challenge and win the race, but not by much, and it was definitely a race still worth fighting for. Even though the race was lost, Jim says the incident still taught them loads about how to respond to the unexpected.

This is something worth bearing in mind for us dinghy sailors, particularly when it comes to practising. When you go out and practise, it's too easy just to go through the standard manoeuvres such as tacking and gybing, and maybe some mark roundings. But what about practising for when things go wrong, such as 720 penalty turns and capsizes? The best way to practise is to put yourself in these pressure situations, and see how you respond.

The other classic thing in classes like the 49er, which do all their racing on windward/leeward courses, is not to bother how to two-sail reach because you never have to do it. Then one day when the wind shifts and the course gets all skewed, suddenly you have to start two-sail reaching, which is the toughest point of sail in the 49er. Times like these really reveal which teams have been putting in the practice for those rare eventualities - and which ones haven't.

The other common mistake is only to practise bear-aways on starboard tack, because that is what you normally do on a port-rounding course. Bearing away in a 49er is a pretty tough exercise in strong winds. It's easy to pitchpole or capsize if you get your timing wrong, so teams practise their bearing away until it works like clockwork. However, try bearing away on the other gybe - and it feels totally alien. This is what Chris Draper and Simon Hiscocks discovered a couple of years ago, when they struggled to bear the boat away on port during an important race in big winds.

So after getting home from the regatta, Chris and Simon went out into Weymouth Bay and put a hard training session in, purely to conquer this one manoeuvre. It didn't take them long before the port bear-away felt like second nature, and it was another weapon in their armoury. Whether they've had to use it in anger since, I don't know. Probably not very often, if at all, but the strangest things often happen at the most crucial of moments.

Of course you can't foresee every possible circumstance, but the other measure of a great sailor is how they respond to the most unusual of problems. There was a time when Adrian Stead and Andy Hemmings were racing their 470 in an international regatta when the lashing that held the top of the jib to the forestay came undone up the final beat.

It was windy, and the jib starting bunching up nastily as it slid down the forestay. Adrian used his extendable tiller extension and handed over the steering to Andy on the trapeze. Adrian then went forwards, untied the spinnaker halyard from the kite, clenched the halyard in his teeth as he jumped up on the foredeck and pulled the jib down some more. This was so that he could lash the halyard on to the top of the jib. Having done this, Adrian hoisted the kite halyard until the jib was nicely tensioned, took back over the helm from Andy, and carried on racing until the finish.

That's an example of smart thinking under pressure, and so it's no surprise that these two have gone on to compete at the very highest level, including the Olympics and the America's Cup. However, there is a postscript to this story, and I'm sure Adrian and Andy would like me to relate the end of their saga, should you ever find yourself in a similar predicament. Having got ashore and patted themselves on the back for an emergency well dealt with, they let off the rig tension, only to hear a tearing sound. Easing the mast back had left the jib luff somewhat overtensioned, to the point where it ripped in two. Ouch! But comforting to know that even the smartest sailors can't be smart all the time.

Actually, one sailor that can seem to do no wrong is Ben Ainslie. His latest victory at the Finn Gold Cup in Moscow makes him the most successful Finn sailor of all time. His fourth straight win at the recent Worlds was his most remarkable because of the conditions under which the regatta took place. With the lake surrounded by tall trees, windshifts of 30 degrees were the norm, with the wind sometimes blowing 25 knots at the bottom of the course while the boats near the windward mark were sitting becalmed in the lee of the dense tree cover. It sounded like racing at Frensham Pond!

If ever there was a chance for the rest of the fleet to take a pop at Ben's dominance, this surely was the regatta, especially because the fleet was racing in supplied boats. The fickle conditions certainly put Ben at his most vulnerable, but the fact that he was still able to win bears testament to his depth of talent. Top Danish Jens Hoegh Christensen put it well when he said that Ben's lowest level of sailing was so high that he is hard enough to beat when Ben is having a bad day, let alone when he is firing on all cylinders.

This summer has been another truly remarkable year for Team GBR, particularly that Golden week when our sailors won European Championships in four Olympic classes. Then there have been a clutch of Silver medals at World level in the Tornado, 49er and 470. And now Ben has crowned the season with more Gold. The other great sailing nations must still be scratching their heads, wondering how Team GBR does it, year in and year out. Long may their head-scratching continue.