Ask a professional sailor what his most precious resource is, and most will say it's 'Time'. Surely it's Wind or Water, isn't it? Well, that bit we can't control, but how we use our time we certainly can control. Here is some background to how and why Rob Greenhalgh structured his Tour Voile campaign, getting his Oman Sail Farr 30 sailing team up to speed in a matter of weeks during the spring of 2010....
Ask Giles Scott what his goal is, and he'll tell you. "The aim is to qualify for the Olympics and to go on and win gold." Already by the end of 2009, his first full season in the Finn class, the then 22-year-old had proven that he's a world class talent. Indeed he has been highlighted as one of the Daily Mail's ‘Magnificent Seven' athletes whom the newspaper is following in the build up to London 2012.
Charlie McKee talks about what it's like to go 'foilin' and 'wingin' at the same time, in perhaps the most hi-tech dinghy ever built - the wing-masted foiling Moth. Charlie reckons it's easier sailing with the wing than the standard soft sail, but it's still early days for wings on dinghies, so the learning curve is massive....
One-design racing is the purest measure of sailing prowess, but if you spend most of your sailing doing club races, then doubtless you will be spending much of your time racing under handicap. So of course you want to know how to 'milk' the system! Indeed, some sailors even choose their boat according to its perceived performance under handicap. Now, that's what you call pot hunting...
There is a beautiful simplicity to the concept of a pursuit race. Set the tortoises off first, then release the hares, and in a perfect race all competitors would finish across the line at the same time. Reality is very different, however, with only a handful of boats in the running by the closing stages. So how do you make sure you are in one of those boats with a fighting chance of winning?
In just 12 months Stuart Bithell's career has gone from a little known Olympic journeyman to one of the world's top 470 crews, Merlin Rocket National Champion helmsman, and Champion of Champions on the British dinghy scene after winning the Endeavour Trophy...
The second edition of the SailJuice Global Warm-up brings together four of the biggest winter handicap racing events into a unified series, to find out just who is tough enough to race their way through the brutal cold of a British winter. Earlier this year competitors battled their way through the first ever Global Warm-up, and this winter's early snow hints at another tough challenge ahead....
Nick Dewhirst has been a thorn in the side of ISAF these past few years, leading a global charge to get the multihull back into the Olympic Regatta for Rio 2016. In the build-up to the ISAF Annual Conference in Athens, Nick says why he thinks the multihull will be invited back in from the cold and back into the bosom of Olympic sailing...
Russell Coutts has turned the professional sailing world on its head with the announcement that the next America's Cup will be contested in 72-foot wing-masted catamarans. Justin and Andy examine the implications...
Audio (2 minutes): The 2007 and 2008 Laser World Championships in Portugal and Australia were windy, and Tom Slingsby won both of them. He's also won two Skandia Sail for Gold Regattas in Weymouth in 2009 and 2010. The young Aussie talks about the technique that makes him so devastatingly quick upwind in the breeze...