Olympic coach and cat sailor extraordinaire, Hugh Styles, talks through the best way of taking your penalty turns in fast multihulls. Painful, but necessary medicine if you fall foul of a fellow competitor. “Most penalties seem to occur around the windward and leeward marks, and if you’re taking one half way up a beat, something must have gone badly wrong..."
Taking the odd 720 penalty, or a 360 for hitting a mark, is one of those inevitable evils that we’ll have to face up to in our sailing lives. To minimise the anguish of the moment when it does happen, it’s worth thinking through ways of taking our penalties in the most efficient manner...