Sailboat Racing Technique Tips by Randy Hecht
On his Sailfaster podcast, Pete Boland talked to Randy Hecht, a San Francisco racing sailor, on the finer points of racing his J/105 Niuhi. Randy and team are back-to-back J/105 North American Champions, having won on the breezy waters of San Francisco Bay in 2022 and Rye, NY, in 2023.
What’s your race starting routine and priority?
We have a pre-race routine that focuses on the start and first weather leg that we go through every single time. If we can get a good start and hold our lane for the first five minutes, or have the option to tack without being pressured to do so, and we’re up at the first weather mark in the top five, we know we’re pretty good for that race. Which means, honestly, the downwind doesn’t really matter.
Our priority is rig tune, as obviously it affects your upwind ability. When you’re coming off the line you’re looking for inches to get over the top of the boat to leeward or keep the boat to weather from crawling over the top of you. That’s where rig tune really makes a difference.
Rig tune that helps you keep the boat in balance at this point, right?
Definitely. We sail with more neutral helm than the vast majority of J/105s. I try to sail with as neutral a helm as possible, which means I’m always pushing the tiller away from me to keep the bow up. Our goal is seven knots upwind because at seven you’re beating the rest of the fleet. But it’s very hard to stay at seven all the time; you can’t do it with weather helm, so we sail with as little helm as we can get away with!
Sailing with neutral helm on a J/105 is tough for the driver.
Yeah, it takes a while to learn how to keep the nose up. With neutral helm you’re not getting as much feedback. That often lends to the bow drifting off. You need to anticipate the bow dropping. But as you said, it all comes down to the balance of the boat. You have to keep the bow hunting, keep the bow up, especially when you see the next puff coming.
Many times we find that you’re going along pretty even with a competitor, and all of a sudden there’s a little shift in the wind—it lightens up maybe. You see their bow drop down maybe a degree or two. I can gain a couple of feet on them by keeping our bow up, stalling the top of the main to get enough weather helm to keep the bow hunting. This is how we make big gains.
What’s the importance of heel angle on the J/105?
We’re very conscious about angle of heel. As per Buddy Melges, there’s an absolute correct angle of heel for every boat. You must figure that out and keep it on that. In the J/105 class it’s somewhere between 18 to 22 degrees of heel. We are very strict about staying within those parameters, assuming you have enough wind to heel the boat over that far!
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