Doing bow onboard a RC44 can get busy and chaotic quickly. We speak to Team Aqua’s Juan Marcos, and Team Charisma’s Ivan Peute to get their best tips and tricks for doing bow on the 44Cup circuit. 

According to Peute, there are three essential things he needs to do to nail the start. The first one is to feed the correct information to the tactician. This is based on judging the time and distance to the line and pre-empting how other boats on the start line will manoeuvre and clearly and precisely communicating that information to the tactician.

 Secondly, the bowman must make clear hand signals when approaching the line, so the helm knows how far from the line they are. Lastly, the bowman needs to know where the line is, so they know whether they are over after the start. Pinging the start line, which means pinpointing where each end of the line is, is key so you can be the closest boat to the line where the starting gun goes. 

 RC44’s are very unique boats with no lifelines which makes staying onboard during the racing absolutely essential. Marcos has a ‘Death zone’ which is between the forehatch and forestay. Whenever he enters the death zone, to ping the line he always ensures he is holding onto something. 

When it comes to hoisting and dropping the spinnaker, the key according to Marcos is having a reliable drop line system. To ensure dropping the spinnaker is clean and efficient, make sure ‘drop lines are ready to run, and the drop line is not underneath the bag for example or tangled.’ If the drop line is not ready to run, then the kite goes into the water and you end up having to fish the kite out of the water which is slow. 

For hoists, it is key to make sure the tapes have been run and the kite can go up into the air without being tangled.

If you want to find out more about racing onboard an RC44 check out this video.