Keep it relaxed. Have fun. Focus more on the enjoyment than the performance. After the crew starts showing up regularly, they'll start wanting to be more competitive. It should come from them.
Give out a bunch of T-shirts. When other folks see your crew on the dock and on the boat in them they'll want to race with you to get one. I get mine from https://www.maritimetees.com/. They're reasonably priced and you can get your boat name/logo on them. As for the rant. Get off the helm!! Let them drive. Rotate positions. Let them do their positions. Unless there is a safety issue, suggest corrections later. We have a local boat where the owner always drives. He's not a great driver. His attention is everywhere but driving. He pinches constantly. (SLOW) Result: boat rarely sails well. Crews don't like to stay on a boat that is a perpetual loser. Remember, there is a BIG difference between RACING a sailboat and developing a racing sailboat PROGRAM. As the skipper, you have to assess each crew member's strengths and weaknesses. Maximize their strengths. Minimize their weaknesses. When I say each crew I mean it. I rarely drove Touche'. Make no mistake, I'm a pretty good driver. But during our most successful years, we had a guy who was better. The driver ONLY drove. I usually did foredeck. Doing foredeck, I was idle a lot of the time. It worked out well because I could focus on training, tweaking, encouraging crew to do their finest. I could also focus on the boat and tactics. After each race we popped beers and had a critique. Too often the owner tries to drive, call tactics, call sail trim, and everything else. To me, that's not a recipe for success. We had a boat here where the skipper provided crew T-shirts. Great! Until he collected them after each race. :( Again, it's a program. It's not an ego trip for the skipper/driver. There's more than one boat in my area folks just don't want to sail on. Dennis C. Touche' 35-1 #83 Mandeville, LA
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