Debriefing with your crew is an essential part of improving your sailing performance. If you are lucky, you will take some time together, in person, after the race. When you run out of time, the debriefing might be just a phone call or an email.

Whatever you do, having some form of debriefing, is already a huge step up from doing nothing!

To provide some inspiration, we have rounded up some example of debriefings prepared by coaches and sailors. They all used ChartedSails to review their data and identify key points to focus on and then they used different techniques and tools to present the data and make it easy to share.

Cilian Dickson - J/24 🇮🇪

Cilian is a J/24 sailor in Ireland, winner of the J/24 Irish National Championship on his boat Headcase.

Cilian has a Velocitek ProStart on board and started using ChartedSails a few months ago.

Last month, he participated in a J/24 training event with the fleet and collected data from multiple boats to compare their performances. After loading the tracks in ChartedSails, he compiled key performance numbers from each race into a few Powerpoint slides.

One slide summarizes upwind performance of all the boats accross seven different races

They chose to focus on:

• Starts: Distance to line and line speed
• Upwind performance (Distance sailed, average speed, average VMG)
• Downwind performance
• Tacking performance (using ChartedSails maneuver analysis).

In each slide he adds a few comments: is the fleet consistent? who is doing the best?

Take a look at the full report for some inspiration on your next race day! (Shared with permission from Cilian - boat names have been changed.)

Ali Charlton - Elliott 770 🇺🇸

Ali is the skipper of Missy, a Elliott 770 at the Oklahoma City Boat Club.

Ali also chose PowerPoint to collect key numbers from the day and share them with his crew. The first thing we noticed is that the slides include who was on the boat that day (important when your crew rotates). He also includes wind data from USGS which is a great idea.

The slides are very rich and combine screenshots of ChartedSails, tables from the maneuver analysis, USGS wind data and comments.

It's a lot but Ali managed to focus on a few important points in a one slide per day format. It looks good, and it's easy to share via email or social media.

Ali prepared a one page summary for each day. He shares them on Facebook.

CISA 2022

CISA Advanced Racing Clinic was held March 19th to March 21st at Alamitos Bay Yacht Club in Long Beach, California.

Three classes were presents: i420s, ILCAs and 29ers. Over 60 sailors and 10+ coaches.

For this event, we chose to use Google Docs to present the data. With a large number of boats we focused on "big picture": is the fleet consistent? when was the race won?

And when it was relevant, we zoomed in on specific moments: did you see the shift during this leg? What was the cost of missing the shift?

Focus on one upwind leg to discuss tactical decision-making and the importance of distance.

The resulting presentation is just a few slides per day which were reviewed during the debriefing. And when sailors had specific questions, we opened ChartedSails and zoomed in on the data!

Conclusion

Some best practices from these three examples:

• Slides are a great way to present a debriefing and share it
• Find a few interesting things from the day and focus on them. Screenshots of ChartedSails, photos and other data (such as external wind data) are all great ways to illustrate your points.
• Make it easy to save and share: A one-pager summary of each race day will be a great way to review progress at the end of the season.

How do you debrief with your crew? With training partners? Let us know what are your best practices and send us your best reports!