“What’s GEO?” I wondered. Geotargeting? Geographies (EMEA, Asia, etc.)? Geolocation (which is Grammarly’s guess)?

Nope. GEO = Generative Engine Optimization. How to optimize for ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and so on.

Why does GEO matter to B2B go-to-market? Two trends:

1) Yelpification: B2B buyers increasingly research tech vendors the same way they’d research a restaurant or plumber. They get 70% of the way through their buying journey before contacting a vendor [1].

2) ChatBots. Those B2B buyers are increasingly using ChatBots, or Generative Engines, rather than traditional Google Search, to do that research.

GEO is where SEO was 20 years ago, a brand-new field, without established best practices, as far as I can tell.

So I want to ask: Are you doing GEO? If so, what’s working, and what’s not? Let me know in the comments.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far about GEO, thanks largely to [3] (fantastic article btw):

1) Don’t abandon SEO. Quality content that addresses common customer questions is great for GEO. Your content should still include “How to {solve X problem}”-type blog posts, and answers to questions in Google’s “People Also Ask” and AnswerThePublic.

2) SERP (search engine results page) rankings are everything in SEO, but don’t matter in GEO.

3) Brand mentions matter more in GEO than in SEO; backlinks matter less in GEO than SEO. Podcasts with transcripts can help here.

4) Digital outposts matter more in GEO; build your content in G2, Wikipedia, AlternativeTo, Product Hunt, and more. Answer as many questions as possible on Stack Overflow. For SEO, these were secondary priorities, but they matter more in GEO.

5) Documentation is a weapon. Ensure that you publish most, if not all, of your documentation publicly, since generative engines will eat it up.

6) Comparison pages (you versus Competitor X) and evaluation guides are crucial — true under both SEO and GEO.

7) Forum pages matter. Make your user forums public, and don’t put them behind a regwall.

8) Find common questions in Gong/Clari/Chorus/etc. customer calls, and on customer Slack/Discord channels, and publish the answers to them to your website (blog, documentation, etc.). Quite possibly, customers asked those questions because a generative engine didn’t answer them.

9) Publish lots of code samples on how to use your API. In your documentation and blog posts, explicitly write out code samples; don’t leave it as an exercise for the reader to parse the API spec. Your technical users will likely use generative engines to write code that interacts with your API, and the more samples, the better the training, and the higher the likelihood it’s correct. Low friction = higher revenue.

10) Use schema markup to highlight organizations, persons, products, and articles.

11) Learn about llms.txt, an emerging technique for GEO, analogous to robots.txt for SEO. [4] [5] Build your own llms.txt file at https://www.llmstxt.new/ and host it on your site, just as you do with robots.txt.

So that’s what I’ve learned so far about GEO.

What am I missing? What did I get wrong? Let me know in the comments!

— -

[1] https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/80-of-b2b-buyers-initiate-first-contact-once-theyre-70-through-their-buying-journey/48394

[2] https://rosssimmonds.com/blog/yelpification/

[3] https://searchengineland.com/integrate-geo-seo-453351

[4] https://mintlify.com/blog/what-is-llms-txt

[5] https://llmstxt.org/

Below is an example of jib hauling; check out the forward crewing “banjoing” the windward sheet. I could see a crew doing this for every wave set: ease the weather sheet through the wave sets, then pull up on the windward sheet in the flat sections. Fast, but definitely an arm workout!

One case in point is here in the San Francisco Bay Area: a decade ago, J/70s were off to a great start. We had almost 70 boats at the Worlds on the Berkeley Circle. The boats sailed well in the Bay’s windy conditions. They’d depower well upwind, and downwind, they were a blast. (Without being insanely overpowered like some other classes.) Today, the class struggles to get more than a handful of boats.

I wrote back to Craig Leweck, the publisher of Sailing Scuttlebutt, with my thoughts on how to structure sailboat class rules to grow participation, and wanted to replicate them, with some edits, below.

—

Any class rule change should bring joy to the sailing experience. I’m not anti-complexity, but what kind of joy does J/70 jib in-hauling bring? Does anyone ever say at the bar after sailing, “Man, it was so awesome. We inhauled the jib, and we pointed one degree higher. It was lit!!”

Of course not. The memories we make on the water are about the close crossings upwind, and the epic speed offwind. Cross-sheeting does neither; it separates the fleet upwind, and doesn’t provide any visceral feeling of speed. It’s the stuff in the photo below that makes memories that keep sailors coming back:

So, what’s a class that’s gotten it right? I’m biased, but I’d say the ILCA (Laser) has done a good job of thoughtfully evolving its class rules:

• ILCA has had more complex sail control systems (outhaul, cunningham, vang) for the past two decades, but it’s made the boat more enjoyable to sail. You don’t need to do crazy gymnastics to pull on the sail controls.
• For years, aluminum Laser masts would regularly break. So, the class decided to allow masts made out of much stronger carbon fiber. But rather than making the carbon fiber masts lighter, they were designed to have roughly the same weight and bend characteristics as the older aluminum ones. As a result, boats with older aluminum masts are still competitive for casual racing, and the carbon masts are overbuilt and thus bulletproof. (In 10 years, we haven’t heard of one breaking.) As a sailing parent, it was reassuring to know that my kid was out there with reliable gear.
• For mainsail trimming downwind on the ILCA, you’re not allowed to trim from the back purchase except briefly, during jibes, or to clear the mainsheet from your transom. Would the boat surf better if you trimmed 1:1 from the back purchase? Absolutely. Would it make the boat even more physical? Yes, so the class doesn’t allow it. And it’s better for it.

Another interesting fact is that, at our most recent ILCA District 24 (Northern California) annual meeting, the #1 piece of feedback was that sailors want to learn. They don’t mind not winning, but they want to feel like they’re advancing in the sport. We’re now putting together regular briefings before regattas. That’s what builds the fleet. Here’s just one example…

I bet a similar dynamic exists in J/70s: owner/drivers want to learn. Does one pro sailor onboard help them learn? Yes. Especially if they’re sitting next to them, trimming main, to continually provide feedback and coaching. I bet J/70 owners really enjoy that coaching, and if they can afford it, see it as money well spent.

Suppose we add another professional sailor, say a jib trimmer. The owner’s costs have doubled, but has their learning doubled? Probably not; there’s only so much information you can absorb as a driver and in off-the-water discussions.

Now add in a third professional, doing bow. It’s hard to provide much feedback from the front position. Costs have tripled, but learning hasn’t tripled. We’re well past the point of diminishing returns. At this point, you’re basically buying trophies.

Professional sailors aren’t cheap; they charge about $1000 a day, plus travel expenses. For a weekend regatta, it’s $2000 per pro. For a five-day championship regatta, it’s more like $11,000 per pro, when you factor in two days of travel, two days of boat setup/pack up, and two days of pre-race tune-up.

Given this, many J/70 owners' goals — learning and improving — hit diminishing returns after one professional sailor has been brought on board. So, the J/70 class should allow for just one pro sailor onboard.

That would reduce owner costs significantly. Weekend regattas would max out at $2000 for one pro, rather than $6,000 for three. For championships, owner costs would decline from $33,000 to $11,000. I know even one pro is out of many folks’ budgets — mine included — but reducing costs would increase participation. It’s basic economics.

If this happened, what would happen with all the sailing pros who would no longer have J/70 racing slots? They’d be hustling for coaching gigs, encouraging people to buy J/70s or get their existing J/70 out racing. That would boost fleet participation.

—

Stepping back, what’s needed is more of a “sailing product mindset”. I’ve heard this expressed a few times by Russell Coutts, the CEO of the highly successful SailGP professional sailing circuit. Here’s just one example of their races:

In interviews, you’ll regularly hear Russell discussing how they’re improving the SailGP “product” of exciting, entertaining, TV-friendly sailboat races that attract a lot of viewers and, thus, advertisers. They regularly adjust the boat designs and format to improve the viewer experience, competitor safety, and advertiser returns on investment.

In other words, think through every decision of their racing circuit and balance the needs of distinct — viewers, advertisers, and sailors. They don’t sleepwalk through these decisions. Similarly, the J/70 class would be well served to stop sleepwalking and balance the needs of professional sailors, owners, and amateur crews.

My two cents…

And if you’re in product marketing or product management, you’ve probably delivered at least one such session in your career. Standing in front of a bored, apathetic whose silence speaks volumes. I know I have.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Here are some ideas on how you can deliver sales enablement that actually helps your sales team hit their goals:

1. Build excitement for Customer Zero
2. Weekly demos
3. Give SDRs the broader context
4. Align with sales leadership
5. Frequent enablement sessions
6. Per-team sessions
7. ABQ: Always be quizzing
8. Make it fun
9. Make it easy to pattern-match
10. Reduce seek time
11. Continually survey sales
12. Use call recordings

Let’s dive into each one of these.

Build excitement for “Customer Zero”

The wrong way: Too often, product marketing focuses on simply throwing content “over the fence” to sales, merely informing them as opposed to exciting them.

The right way: I always stress to my product marketing team that they should think of the sales team as “Customer 0”, your very first buyer. If you can’t get them excited, they won’t sell your new product or feature.

Like a lot of these suggestions, it seems obvious. But I often don’t see product marketers step up and get the sales team excited.

Short weekly Demos

The wrong way: Demos come after a product launch, are heavily produced, and too long. As a result, too much time passes post-launch to build excitement for the sales team.

The right way: Every week, after your sales all-hands (or your company all-hands, if you’re small), have your product and engineering teams give demos of new products, features, and capabilities. 10–15 minutes is typically enough to cover what’s new. This will get Customer Zero — sales — excited about what’s coming. For product marketers, the recordings of these weekly demos will provide a significant body of material to create a more polished launch video.

Clear instructions for SDRs

The wrong way:

Product marketing often creates one-size-fits-all content for all types of sales team members. But general guidance that works for seasoned account execs doesn’t work for a new SDR (sales development rep) fresh out of college.

The right way:

Sales development is a numbers game: emails per day, meetings per week, qualified leads per month, and so on. Efficiency rules.

I often hear from SDR managers that their team needs step-by-step discussion guides and clear lead qualification guidelines. These help new SDRs ramp quickly, so give them that.

Eventually, they’ll improvise, but early on, they need recipes.

Ecosystem context

The wrong way:

When delivering sales enablement for a new product or feature, product marketers dive straight into their value props, without any background explanation for a non-technical sales audience. This leaves sales confused — the exact opposite of the excitement you want to build.

Here’s an example.

I once worked for a software monitoring company that checked whether applications and their underlying cloud infrastructure were up and running. We released a new extension that could monitor Kubernetes.

The wrong way would be to jump right into covering what new monitoring metrics the new extension provided, without explaining what Kubernetes actually is.

The right way:

Provide just enough context for the sales team to confidently discuss a new product or capability.

Crafting this is an art. You don’t want to take a trip down memory lane, filled with pointless details.

On the other hand, historical background is relevant if it connects to sales situations today.

Back to the Kubernetes example: What worked was explaining Kubernetes to the sales team in simple terms related to sales qualification.

The explanation went like this:

• Kubernetes manages a group of cloud servers.
• You typically need a group of servers when you need to scale up to handle a lot of users. Lots of users = important app.
• So, Kubernetes is an indicator of an important app.
• So, when a customer mentions Kubernetes, qualify up.

Be sure to cover lingo. For example, Kubernetes is often shortened to k8s.

Explain adjacent technologies. For instance, we mentioned that Kubernetes is provided by the big three cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) as well as smaller ones, so for qualification purposes, don’t bother asking what cloud provider they use.

In tech, there are lots of foundational technologies. Your job as a product marketer is to give your SDRs just enough background to speak coherently to a customer.

Account execs, or AEs, typically have at least a few years under their belt. It’s a stressful job. When AEs join a company, they are on a timeline to start pulling in revenue. Then every quarter after that, they need to hit their sales quota.

Obvious, right? But I’ve seen a lot of product marketers don’t seem to share that same urgency. Even though their job is ultimately the same as the AEs — pull in revenue — albeit by equipping multiple AEs.

There’s a long list of deliverables that AEs need. Pitch decks, customer stories, competitive analysis, objection handling, pricing/packaging guides, ROI, demos, and more.

A product marketer can’t deliver all this at once. The key is prioritization.

For example, I like to a have a regular meeting with sales leadership to review and update sales content calendar, covering how I and/or my product marketing team sequence the sales enablement content we provide, and when can we deliver it. To keep timing realistic, we factor in other demands on our time, such as product launches and marketing events. I find it best to hold this meeting every couple of weeks.

Sales engineers, or SEs, are your technical sales team members, often paired with multiple account execs. They possess a unique blend of technical skills and communications abilities, and thus are typically in short supply. They probably understand the product’s functionality and technical underpinnings better than you do — make sure they know you know that — and emphasize how you can help them hone their “elevator pitch” of their product’s high-level value propositions, customer stories, and how to weave them into their product demos.

Align with sales leadership

The wrong way: Product marketing comes up with sales enablement topics in a vacuum. Typically this is based on whatever new products, features, or capabilities the product team is launching. Often this is useful, but can miss important topics unrelated to product functionality, such as a tough competitor or confusing pricing.

The right way: Have regular meetings with sales leadership— I find every other week is usually the right frequency — to determine sales enablement topics. The meeting should include whoever leads sales operations (including enablement and certification) as well as the head of sales (if a smaller company) or a couple of their trusted direct reports (if a larger company).

The goal of this meeting should be to align on the sales enablement calendar. This should include topics driven by product updates (new products/features), competitive topics, demand-generation (campaigns), and updates to pricing/packaging. It can also include “redos” — topics that were previously covered, but didn’t quite land.

These topics should fit into your sales enablement cadence, which we cover below.

Frequent enablement sessions

The wrong way: Too often, product marketing only delivers sales enablement at annual sales kickoffs. I can’t tell you how many times I, as a product marketer, have been given a slot on day two or three to train the sales team on my product. The sales team is bored out of their mind, suffering from information overload, and hung over.

How can you make anything stick in this situation?

Of course, product marketing should present at sales kickoffs, but you need other sessions where you have their full attention. Here’s how.

The right way: Hook into your sales team’s existing meeting cadence. Ask your sales leadership to carve out a portion of their weekly sales team meeting for a short, 10–15 minute timeslot focused on sales enablement.

Why does this work?

• Bite-sized. Product marketing delivers sales enablement content in small chunks. The sessions are too short for anyone to tune out.
• Crisp. Product marketing is forced to deliver short, compelling messaging — mirroring what sales needs to do in their customer meetings.
• Accountability. Sales leadership is present, so everyone’s motivated to pay attention.
• Timely. If your product team — or a competitor — has shipped a new version/capability/feature, you can explain it to the sales team within a week.

What if you have a bigger launch? Break up the content across multiple weeks. Maybe focus on customer pain points on week one, followed by new features, then pricing/packaging, and so on.

Per-team sessions

The wrong way: only presenting a one-size-fits-all session to the entire sales team. These sessions are necessary, but often not sufficient.

The right way: Work with sales leadership to set up multiple weekly enablement sessions tailored for specific sales teams. Some common patterns:

• One session for your North American sales team, another for Europe, and a third for Asia; different teams may have differing concerns, and time zones may make it hard for everyone to attend a single session.
• Present in the weekly SDR meeting, since they might have questions they’d be embarrassed to ask in a global sales meeting.
• Present in the weekly sales engineering meeting, since SEs often want to go much deeper than AEs and SDRs. If you go to that depth with AEs and SDRs present, they’ll tune out and get frustrated. So, give the SEs their own session where they can deep-dive to their heart’s content. Embrace these sessions, since SEs are often deeply analytical and a great source of input to harden your messaging.

Always be quizzing

The wrong way: Product marketing often delivers sales enablement as a series of slides, followed by Q&A at the end. There’s no way to check in with the sales team to ensure that what you’re saying actually sticks.

The right way: With apologies to Alex Baldwin from Glengarry Glen Ross, Always Be Quizzing in your sales enablement sessions. Don’t let more than 3–4 slides pass without presenting a quiz on what you just covered, and ask the sales audience to respond.

You can start with more basic questions and then work up to more difficult ones later. At the end, you can present a case study of 1–2 paragraphs that really get the audience thinking.

For smaller, in-person groups, the quiz can be simply a slide that shows the correct answer in a build. For larger and/or remote groups, you can use a tool like Crowdpurr or Kahoot to enable the entire audience to answer, display a leaderboard, and give a prize to the winners, such as a gift card you can email right after the sales enablement session. Salespeople are competitive — often they did sports in school — and I’m always impressed with how these kinds of contests get everyone listening and engaged.

Make it fun

The wrong way: At in-person sales kickoff events, by the time product marketing delivers their sales enablement on day two or three, the audience (sales) is bored, overloaded with information, tired, and sometimes hungover. Against this backdrop, product marketing “phones it in” and delivers a boring slide deck that most audience members can’t remember by day’s end.

The right way: Your audience has been sitting for hours, maybe days, silently listening. Salespeople are extroverts — they love to talk — and often were athletes in school, so this is not exactly fun. Look for ways to get them on their feet and talking. Some ideas:

• Throwable prizes. Quiz the sales team (as explained above) but make the prizes something you can throw to the winners. One year, presenting to a few hundred sales reps in a meeting room, we did limited-edition t-shirts with custom designs for our products — something you’d want to wear on the weekends. Each time someone won a quiz, we’d huck a shirt to them.
• Group case study. Craft a complex sales scenario that takes a few paragraphs to explain. Ensure there’s no single right answer. Break the audience into small groups, perhaps folks that don’t often work together, like an SDR from one geo, an AE from another, and an SE from a third. Have them work on a plan for the strategy they’d use to win the deal, including prospecting (SDR), pitch/proposal (AE), and demo/RFP (SE), then present to the audience. Of course, have everyone vote on the winner and give them a cool prize.
• Whiteboard tournament. Often with technical products, whiteboarding is an effective way to pitch prospects. The energy in the room is better, since the salesperson comes across more like an artist, crafting a piece customized for the prospect. One year at a major cloud vendor with several thousand salespeople, we held a “whiteboard tournament”. We had several breakout rooms of maybe 100 people each, who learned the step-by-step of how to draw the whiteboard, and would present to everyone else in the room. The winner of each room was voted on, and graduated to the next level. Eventually, the top five presented to thousands of their peers, with the South Korean team, who delivered the whiteboard pitch in their own language, impressing the crowd and winning at the end of the day.

Make it easy to pattern-match

The wrong way: Product marketing explains value propositions in the abstract. For example, they might write, “our software is available both on-premises and as a cloud service on major CSPs”. Salespeople are left to translate how to use this information in their customer meetings.

The right way: In every sales enablement session, make it super-obvious what you’re asking the sales team to do. Include a discussion guide that explicitly describes how sales explain the new product, feature, capability, or objection handling you’re teaching.

I find it helpful to put this into a table with three columns:

• Ask /Listen for— What the salesperson should ask, if it hasn’t already come up in the conversation.
• If This — The pattern to look for, such as a customer requirement, pain point, a technology used, etc.
• Then That — What the salesperson should say, show, or use (slides, demo, other sales tool).

For example, building on the example above, the discussion guide could be:

• Ask /Listen for — where the customer deploys their software.
• If This — AWS/Amazon Web Services
• Then That —1) Explain that we run in 10 AWS regions [List]; 2) Explain have unified billing via AWS Marketplace; 3) Use this slide showing a map of which datacenters we run in.

Of course, you’d have additional rows of If This/Then That for other cloud providers like Azure, Google Cloud, and On-Premises.

To a knowledgeable product marketer, this approach might feel like you’re being painfully obvious. But for two of your three Customer Zero personas — the SDR and the AE — they’re often coming up to speed on the technology, and continually stressed for time, and this explicit approach makes things simpler to get things right even when moving quickly.

To be clear, this is not a mandate for how to communicate with customers. It’s only a starting point for salespeople to build upon and convert to their own communication style.

Reduce seek time

The wrong way: Sales team members, continually time-stressed, search for sales content in multiple locations, documents, and slide decks.

The right way: Continually consolidate sales enablement content so that there are fewer places to search.

• Create a single page, such as a Google Doc, that the sales team can visit to find all their sales needs. Don’t worry about size. The document will become very long — maybe even 50 pages or more — but sales team members can search within that document to quickly access the content they need.
• In this document, put content into an FAQ (frequently asked questions) format; the answers might link into other deliverables, but the FAQ format helps surface content in those deliverables and makes it easily discoverable.
• Copy the discussion guides described above into this document so that they’re not tucked away in a slide deck. Wherever possible, link them together so that a salesperson has a guide of how to go from one topic to another.
• This document should use an automatically-generated table of contents, allowing sales to click to quickly access content, rather than scrolling forever. A basic step that saves time for everyone.
• Create a single deck of all your slide content — your elevator pitch, your customer stories, competitive slides, everything. Explain to sales that they’d never share the entire deck with a customer, but that this lets them quickly craft a deck customized to the needs of their sales situation by deleting (or hiding) slides, which is much quicker than open multiple decks and copying/pasting between them. This also avoids the glitches that can arise with different slide templates.
• In this master deck, insert relevant tags into the comments, like #pricing, #competition, #customerstory, #industryname, or #persona, so they can easily zero on the right content for a particular sales scenario.

Continually survey sales

The wrong way: Product marketing delivers a sales enablement session, goes back to whatever they were doing, and has no idea if their session is useful or not. When it comes time for performance reviews, they don’t have proof points of how their sessions contributed to sales effectiveness.

The right way: After each sales enablement session, send out a simple survey to determine whether it worked, and how to improve. I find it helpful to have the following format:

• How effective was the session? [Numerical score, 1–5 or 1–10]
• What worked well?
• What didn’t work?
• How to improve?

That’s it. Four questions, repeated weekly or whenever you do a session.

The good news about this is that you get bad news early, so you can address it promptly, before it festers.

Review the highlights of the surveys in your regular sales enablement planning meetings that you cover with sales leadership. Use that to inform the topics and format of future sessions.

Use call recordings to track effectiveness

The wrong way: When asked how much their sales enablement content is being used, product marketing has no answer.

The right way: If your company records customer meetings using Gong or a similar tool, search the transcripts for topics that you’ve recently covered in sales enablement.

For example, when you launch a new product or feature, search for its name in the meeting transcripts every week to see how often it’s being mentioned. If it isn’t, ask why — was it your enablement session, the feature itself, the pricing, or something else?

Or if you did an enablement session on how to respond to a competitor, search for its name, review the discussion, and see if the sales team was able to successfully counter any competitive claims to arose.

Conclusion

These are some practices that I’ve found useful for delivering sales enablement sessions. Of course, there’s MUCH more that goes into preparing the content behind these sales enablement sessions, but those are topics for other blog posts.

For the other product marketers reading this — what have you found to be effective practices when training your sales team?

Getting there

If flying in, Oakland International (OAK) is the closest airport. San Francisco International (SFO) is the next closest. San Jose airport is pretty far away.

If driving in, enter “Alameda Community Sailing Center” into Google Maps, Waze, or Apple Maps. Note that the last turn into our driveway can be easy for first-timers to miss; that turn off is at 161 Central Ave, Alameda, CA 94501. Here’s what that looks like.

Keep following your maps directions to the end of the parking lot. Eventually you’ll see a sign marking your destination:

Boat storage

To store your boat at ACSC before or after the regatta, contact contact them.

Lodging

For lodging, check out hotels in Alameda: Hawthorn Suites by Wyndham and Neptune Palace Hotel. Emeryville is about ten minutes away and has two Hyatts, a Sheraton, and a Hilton. Berkeley is 20 minutes away and has an Aiden by Best Western and Residence Inn. Avoid San Francisco since it will be more expensive and Bay Bridge traffic can be unpredictable.

As for restaurants, there are tons in Alameda, Berkeley, and the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland. Use Yelp to find them. An easy and inexpensive go-to if you’re hungry after a windy session is the Alameda In-N-Out Burger.

Local conditions

For detailed wind forecasts, you can use PredictWind and the Saildrone app has both wind and current forecasts. ACSC is open water with oscillating shifts, so bring a compass if you have one. Tidal currents are milder than on, say, the San Francisco cityfront. If you want to see what the current is doing, the large freighters to the west will tell you; they rotate on their anchors, with their sterns pointing in the direction of the current.

Alameda’s climate is generally pretty mild. For example, average air temperatures in October are a high of 71 degrees and a low of 55. While we can get rain, it’s unlikely. Average wind speeds in October start at 6 knots at noon and peak at 9 knots around 5 pm. Source. Water temps are typically around 60 degrees in October.

Here are a couple of shot of our typical conditions, both taken the same afternoon. Sometimes, it’s 9 knots and full hiking, and sometimes, the breeze drops to 5 knots.

Clothing

In terms of clothing, it’s good to be ready for a range of temperatures. For mild days, a 1mm wetsuit top and hiking pants are a good idea. For hot days, a lycra top plus hiking pants are the right call; even if the air temps are hot, the water temps are chilly. For cold days — which can be during our winter, as well as our Twain-esque summers, follow this guide to cold weather Laser sailing gear.

ACSC doesn’t have a locker room, so to change into and out of your clothes, you should bring a towel. Also, a bath mat set on the pavement is nice to keep your feet clean.

Whatever you do, don’t sail barefoot, since you’ll be launching off a ramp. Speaking of…

Ramp

It’s a couple-minute walk from ACSC to the public ramp, so a dolly is mandatory. We share the ramp with a bunch of other folks, including fishermen, paddle boarders, and kayakers, so it’s important that you’re ready to get in and out quickly. Here are tips on how to be a good ramp citizen.

Here’s what the ACSC ramp looks like.

Onsite food and drink

Bring your own food and drinking water from the hotel or wherever you’re staying. As a former Navy base, ACSC doesn’t yet have plumbing. This isn’t a yacht club; it’s a boat storage facility with covered picnic tables (see below). What makes ACSC awesome are its sailing conditions — not its dining service.

Safety

The one thing to keep in mind is car break-ins. It’s all too common in the Bay Area. One tip is to think like a thief: they probably won’t want a laundry basket of wet clothing and a rudder is unsellable. But a toolbox, sunglasses, or duffle bag will look enticing. So keep as much as possible in your hotel room or ACSC. Keep your enticing items hidden under the sail-specific/wet stuff. Don’t leave anything with Bluetooth or WiFi in your car, even if hidden. That said, I’ve never heard of anything being stolen out of the ACSC parking lot. More tips.

It’s almost always chilly inSan Francisco. Here’s what we’re using to beat the cold.

For context, the water temperature in San Francisco Bay ranges from a low of 49 degrees in January to a high of 70 degrees in August. Our air temperatures on the Bay range from a low of about 45 degrees on some days, to a high of maybe 75 degrees. At Alameda Community Sailing Center, we launch from a ramp that involves us getting waist-deep, so we need gear that keeps us from getting chilled even though we haven’t fully warmed up.

Hiking pants

Rooster Pro Hikers 4/3mm Full-Length pants (alt link) are my go-to for sailing in anything cooler than tropical conditions.

These aren’t cheap, and I chewed them up a couple of years ago on a Laser with a sloppy repair job on the rail (the legendary Bucket Seats). So, I protect them with Rooster wear protection shorts. These are heavier-duty than typical spandex pants. I’m now on my second pair of these shorts; I get about 150 days out of each pair. At about $50 per pair, it definitely is less expensive than replacing your $200 hiking pants.

I recently got Rooster Hot Legs to go under my wetsuit on cold days in the low 50s or lower. They help take the edge off the cold.

Boots

I originally got the Rooster Low Cut Boots for warm weather sailing, but it turns out they’re just fine for cold weather, for my feet anyways. I was surprised they kept my feet warm, even when submerging my feet while launching in 50 degree water. They also provide enough grip when hiking.

Here are the advantages of the low cut boot over traditional ankle boots:

• Less “dead weight” in the middle of the boat that doesn’t help stability.
• Fewer nooks and crannies for the mainsheet to get hung up on.
• Less expensive.
• Longer lasting, since the boot material isn’t being pulled by shoe laces.
• Quicker to put on and off.
• Quicker to dry.
• Bottom of hiking pants don’t get worn out as quickly.

Now, some people get cold feet in the winter. I don’t. But if you do, check out Roosters Hot Stuff socks. It’s made of titanium neoprene, which I’ve used on my torso and leg layers and basically traps in a layer of thermally insulated air against your skin, not unlike aluminum survival ponchos. If I were doing a regatta in an exceptionally cold venue, these would be on my list to try.

Top

I wear a Rooster SuperTherm Top. It’s 4mm thick. Newer models are fuzzy inside, to hold even more heat. For me, this is enough for about 60 degrees air temperature and windy, or 55 degrees and light air.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Maybe controversial. Some folks like to layer on a Rooster Pro Aquafleece Top. I’ve got one of these, and I love it for keelboat racing, especially during windy San Franciso summers. But for Lasers, I’m not a fan of how much windage it carries. That said, if it’s raining AND in the low 50s or colder, I’ll put one of these on. This is because the evaporation of rain on clothing is a cooling process, and in this situation, neoprene isn’t enough. I’ve learned this the hard way.

But if it’s not low 50s and raining, I go with additional neoprene layers. They keep my core warm, arms free, and windage low. If it’s windy and 50 degrees air temp (but not raining), or rainy and 55 degrees air, I’ll layer on one or even two 2mm wetsuit vests. I have an O’Neill 2mm Men’s Vest. You’ll be rocking 8mm, enough to keep the cold away. But because it’s just on your core, your arms will be free to move quickly to trim the mainsheet.

If you go with one of these vests, know that they’re sized super small. I normally wear a size large shirt, sometimes a medium. With these, I need an extra large. Remember, you’re wearing this outside a 4mm top. Go a size higher.

I also recently picked up a Rooster Hot Top. It’s only 0.5mm, but has that same ridiculously warm titanium neoprene. It doesn’t breathe, but there are times when you don’t care about breathability, you just need to stay warm; that’s what this top does. I wear it as my innermost layer.

When wearing this under my Rooster SuperTherm top, I felt like my arms were restricted. So, after emailing Rooster to see if they could make a vest version of this and getting no reply, I cut off the arms myself. It sounds extreme, but it actually worked well. It helps keep my core warm with minimum bulk, but leaves my arms free.

For moderate conditions, I wear a Rooster ThermaFlex 1.5mm Top. When to wear it is a function of air temperature, water temperature, and wind strength. Here are some data points on when I wear it:

• 60-degree air temperature, 65-degree water temperature, light air midwinter day in Alameda or Richmond (in San Francisco Bay)
• 70-degree air temperature, 55-degree water temperature, 10 knots on a relatively light air San Francisco Cityfront day.
• 85-degree air temperature (at least on land), 60-degree water temperature, and blowing 15 to 25 on the Columbia River Gorge.

Hat

Down to about low 50s and windy, or high 40s and light, I’ll go with a bump cap — essentially a baseball cap with a plastic insert to protect your head. A bump cap is a nice middle ground between a jogging cap and a large, heavy, unwieldy helmet that might make it hard to get under the boom with a lot of vang on. It’s good for protecting your head against the numerous little bumps such as shooting head-to-wind before the start to check the wind direction or line bias. Get the model with the long brim, which is the same size brim as a typical baseball cap.

A less obvious advantage of a bump cap is sun protection: no light is getting through the top of the bump cap, making it far superior to any cloth baseball cap in this regard.

For neck and face protection, I really like Huk. They’re a fishing apparel company and have neck gaiters that fit much better than Buffs.

If the temperature drops further, you can go with a Rooster Pro Aquafleece Beanie. This is great for summertime sailing in San Francisco when it’s foggy and 20+ knots.

But if it’s really cold, say low 50s and rain, go with the nuclear option: an NRS Storm Hood. If you’re not familiar with them, NRS is a great brand focused on kayaking gear. I wear a size large.

It’s amazing at keeping the warmth in when it’s cold because it covers your neck as well as your head. It’s even more potent when you tuck it under your wetsuit top to keep cold air from escaping. Unlike warm neck gaiters, it doesn’t let any cold air or water get to your neck. (Fun fact: the Cleveland Clinic says that you lose about 10% of your heat through your head.)

This is a great way to be mentally ready for gnarly days when a lot of sailors want to stay on land. I didn’t go, but I’ve been told the 2018 Laser Masters Worlds in Ireland had days like this.

I haven’t had a chance to try it, but a Rooster Aquafleece Balaclava could be an interesting choice for when you need more than an Aquafleece Beanie, but not quite as warm as an NRS Storm Hood. One thing I’d worry about is if breathing is impaired by having your mouth covered. Something to keep an eye on.

Gloves

I don’t know why, but my hands don’t get cold when sailing. So I go with gardening gloves down even to high 40s air temperatures.

Even when wearing gloves, for long regattas I love using Goat Tape, a brand of weightlifter tape. Without Goat Tape, I get blisters after a couple of days of trimming hard; with Goat Tape, I can trim aggressively throughout a regatta.

When I was setting up my kid to race Optis on a lake in Holland a while back, and they had to be ready to sail in snow, we went with Atlas TEMRES Insulated Gloves. I don’t ever use these, but if you suffer cold hands, maybe these are an option.

Another option might be to get larger gardening gloves and wear Rooster Hot Hands underneath.

Lifejacket

A lifejacket (aka PFD) won’t keep you warm, but you should definitely go with one. If you’re wearing all these layers, you’ll want something that’s low profile so you can get under the boom, especially when sailing a Laser Radial (ILCA 6) in heavy air with a lot of vang.

I’ve got an old Zhik P3 Buoyancy Aid from around 2015 that’s held up. One thing I like is the front pocket, which is big enough to carry up to three protein bars to keep me going on a long day, as well as some spare rope, a multi-tool for repairs, a grease pencil to track wind direction, a whistle for safety, and my cockpit plug for ILCA class rules compliance.

I haven’t done a comparison, but Rooster and Spinlock have buoyancy aids that seem interesting; I’ll consider them when my Zhik finally wears out.

If you’re doing regattas run by US Sailing, like Youth Champs, you need to go with a slightly bulkier Zhik USCG Approved PFD or Rooster USCG Approved PFD. The downside of these is that their increased bulk means that they’re more likely to get you stuck under the boom, leading to a capsize; if that’s in cold water, that could lead to hypothermia. So, US Coast Guard approval doesn’t necessarily mean safer. Meanwhile, the Zhik P3 Buoyancy Aids are approved by the Coast Guard equivalents of many other countries.

To keep you from getting caught under the boom and capsizing in cold weather, put something on over your lifejacket. I have a Rooster Race Bib. It works okay, but the bottom elastic is wearing out quicker than it should; I’m using some race bibs (also called pinnies) that I got at regattas which are working well.

Conclusion

You’ll probably notice that I’ve emphasized a lot of Rooster Sailing gear. I don’t get paid by them. I simply like a few things about them:

• Their founder is a sailor, who actively races Lasers. This drives an imperative for all the gear to be well-designed and durable.
• I’ve found their gear to be reasonably priced, in addition to being functional.
• They’re based in England, so they know a thing or two about bad weather.

A lot of my links point to West Coast Sailing. I don’t get paid by them either, but they support our sport with a ton of regatta sponsorships and they have great service to boot.

Removed from the 2023 list

Gear is continually evolving, so here’s what I recommended in 2023, but no longer do so.

Boots

I used to wear Zhik 360 boots. Since they’re not that durable (typical for the Zhik line), I have about three pairs collecting dust. The problem is that they’re heavier than low cut boots, provide more nooks and crannies for your mainsheet to get caught, are more expensive, and don’t provide any additional grip. It’s all downside with no upside.

I was looking into the the Rooster Pro Laced Ankle Strap Boot, but again, they have all the same downsides as the Zhik 360s.

Hat

I previously recommended a jogging cap, like this one on Amazon, but it doesn’t have the extra protection — both from the boom and the sun — of a bump cap.

Boots

Previously I mentioned the Rooster ThermaFlex Wet Socks as an option if you have cold feet. But the Rooster titanium neoprene is so hot — annoyingly hot if it’s not super cold — that I’m sticking to that as my sole recommendation (bad pun, I know…).

There are some trends that could drive a fundamental shift in social media:

1. Lack of trust. Trust is the scarcest element in social media today. Any social media company that is built on advertising will never have the trust of a subscription-based social media company. Companies that address scarcity tend to be successful.
2. Commoditized technology. What’s no longer scarce: the underpinning technologies of social media: capturing and displaying photos and videos on multiple types of devices, recommending new social connections and posts. What was cutting-edge in 2004 is now well-known.
3. Habitualized subscriptions. Meanwhile, users are getting increasingly used to paying for subscriptions: app stores, streaming services, SaaS applications, cloud services, etc. It’s not 2005 anymore; not everything needs to be ad-supported.
4. Social imperative. Connecting socially with others is a basic human need. This only increases as some kinds of jobs can be done from anywhere, and friends relocate far away.
5. The Social Network, isn’t. As Facebook/Meta and others pursue the novelty-driven user experience of TikTok — “show me what’s interesting from people I don’t know” — it creates room for companies that want to get back to meeting the need for keeping in touch with friends and family, even when remote.
6. Legacy-driven investors. Large tech fortunes have created a donor class focused on legacy, not profit. Example: MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. Or Craig Newmark, of Craigslist.

—

Put all these together, and it seems like new social media companies could be created along the following lines:

1. Mission-committed. Focus on social connection first, not whatever drives the most revenue. In other words, don’t get pulled into the latest fads, as Facebook is doing with TikTok.
2. Trust-building business model. A subscription business model eliminates the conflicts of interest that drives Facebook’s trust-eroding privacy practices. Again — trust is the scarcest element.
3. Subscriber-owned to lock-in trust. Each subscriber owns a portion of the company, and thus the company has a fiduciary, legal obligation to protect their interests. This is similar to what Vanguard does — investors each own a portion of the company — which forces Vanguard to act in their interests. It’s the opposite of Facebook/Meta’s ownership structure, where Mark Zuckerberg controls 90% of class B shares, giving him control over the company. [1]
4. Subscription holiday to jumpstart growth. To fix the cold-start problem [2] inherent in building a business with network effects, make the service free until it gets to a critical mass of subscribers. We can debate if critical mass is 10 million users, 100M, 1B, or some other measure. But be transparent about the threshold, and the subscription price once its hit. Speaking of price…
5. Priced for adoption. Keep entry level prices low to be point of being negligible for the vast majority of users. Maybe one dollar a month. Maybe cheaper in countries with lower levels of disposable income. Whatever it is, keep it lower than most other subscription services in order to encourage adoption, but not to shift back to the problematic ad-driven model.
6. Internally-funded innovation. A very low subscription price, at scale, can fund innovation. 100M users at $1/month is $1.2 billion per year. That’s enough to pay cloud infrastructure and the engineers to build and run apps. Back-of-the-envelope path: suppose for argument’s sake that half of that, $600M, goes towards cloud service providers. That’s approaching the $1B/year that Netflix spends. The other $600M could fund 2000 engineers at $300k/year/engineer. That’s enough to build a great deal of capabilities and bring them to emerging platforms (like AR glasses, cars, IoT/smart home…).
7. Legacy-driven funding. A business like this probably might not attract traditional venture capital funding. Even if every one of Facebook’s 3 billion users all switched to this business and paid 1 USD/month, that would be $36B per year. That’s well short of Facebook’s $120B/year [5]. Who might fund it? A set of mission-driven investors who wants their legacy to include a trusted, self-sustaining organization that socially connects the world. Craig Newmark could be one such investor (at least advisor), having built one such Internet institution (Craigslist) that facilitates community and commerce in an economically-sustaining manner. But there could be many other investors as well.

Again, technological acumen and capital aren’t what’s scarce in social media; trust is.

[1] https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-silences-its-investors

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Start-Problem-Andrew-Chen/dp/0062969749

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/netflix-pays-1-billionyear-amazon-faraz-ali

[4] https://datareportal.com/essential-facebook-stats

[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook/

Overview

This was my first Masters Worlds, and the regatta was one of the best ones I’ve been to. Not because I got a great result — I finished 7th out of 14 boats in my division (45 to 54 years old) — but because the racing was so challenging and fulfilling.

The level of competition demanded perfection in every way possible: every wave, and every windshift, had to be handled perfectly. This is because the talent pool in my group was incredibly deep:

• Adonis Bougiouris of Greece, a past Olympian and 5x world champion. A week prior, he finished an impressive 47th in the open ILCA 7 worlds, racing against sailors half his age.
• Ernesto Rodriguez, from Miami, a past Masters World Champion who probably would have represented Cuba in the 1996 Olympics in Athens had he not defected to the US (that’s a whole story in itself).
• Orland Gledhill, the UK’s representative to the 1996 Olympics, and UK Masters Champion.
• Ray Davies of Canada, Laser European Masters Champion.
• Peter Hurley, based in NYC and three-time runner-up in the Laser Masters Worlds.
• Rod Barnes, Australian Masters National Champion, and Nick Alexander, who finished second to him.
• Roger Schulz of Germany, 4th in the Laser European Masters.

Like, damn.

The format

Some of you reading this might have little or no understanding of sailboat racing, while some of you might not be familiar with Laser racing. So, let’s do a quick overview. Experienced Laser sailors can skip this bit.

A Laser (official name: ILCA Dinghy) is a fourteen-foot sailboat. Picture an oversized surfboard with a sail, and you get a sense of the boat. Here’s me sailing one. Physically, it demands a lot of endurance in your quads, core, and arms to continually adjust the sail, and support your weight to keep the boat from tipping over.

We sailed out of Puerto Vallarta, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. It was hot. Really hot. More on that later.

We sailed the Laser outer course, pictured below. The course is set with inflatable buoys anchored to the sea floor. In the diagram below, the wind direction is blowing from the top towards the bottom.

Basically, the course was:

1. Sail upwind (against the wind) for about 15 minutes
2. Reach (wind on your side) for a few minutes
3. Downwind (wind behind you) for several minutes
4. Upwind again for another 15 minutes.
5. Downwind for several minutes
6. Reach for a couple of minutes
7. Upwind for a few minutes.

Confused? Yeah, so was I at one point. More on that in a bit.

The first day was just a practice race, not scored in the final result, to get used to the venue. We then had three days, each with two races lasting about an hour each. Then a day off, followed by three more days of two races each. A pretty grueling schedule, considering that during each of those hourlong races you had to be at max heart rate.

There were several divisions, broken out by age:

• Apprentice: 35 to 44 years old
• Masters (my group): 45 to 54 years
• Grandmasters: 55 to 64 years
• Great Grandmasters: 65 to 74 years

Apprentices and Masters started together, for a ~20-boat fleet.

My performance

Here’s how I assess my overall performance:

• Downwind: biggest weakness, but improving. I’ve got to get myself to some downwind clinics and get some coaching to fix this.
• Scheduling (getting to the course on time, etc.): weak initially but improved fast.
• Starts, upwind, reaches, heat management, fitness, gear: good with some hiccups.

Here are my finishes in each of the races; moments of brilliance where I’d hold on for a third. But plenty of inconsistency. To get onto the podium, third place, one needed to average fourth place to amass around 44 points in 11 races.

Here’s a deep dive into how I did at each part of the regatta — what worked, what didn't, and lessons learned.

Starts

I had good starts in 11 out of 13 races. What worked:

• Using a compass. It was crucial to use a compass to find the favored end. Right after we had our 5-minute warning signal, I’d sail up to the committee boat’s flag, bear away to a beam reach, point at the pin end, and get the compass bearing. Since my vang was max eased and mainsheet luffing, I was pretty much motionless. I’d wait several seconds for the compass to settle down, get the bearing, then add 90 degrees to get the perpendicular heading. I’d sail down the line, get clear air, and take a wind shot. Again, vang off so you don’t get knocked in the head. So much more accurate and quicker than having to sail upwind on either tack and guess!
• Practice starts. Once you've done a wind shot and have a hypothesis on where you’ll start, do a practice start at that end. This will inform your time/distance thinking as well as laylines to the pin or boat.
• Agile strategy. I’d get one or two more wind shots, the last one around two minutes to the start, which gave me enough time to sprint to the favored side. This allowed me to make the right choice even if the wind direction shifted late in the starting sequence.
• Not taking huge risks. I didn’t try to win a side if it was risky. For instance, we had a sailor, Adil Khalid from the United Arab Emirates, who lined up so close to the pin boat, he could barely clear it without luffing head to wind and sculling. I was happy to start one up from him since, by the time we cleared the pin, he’d slowed so much that we were even.
• Seizing opportunities. At the same time, if a side of the line was uncontested, I wouldn't hesitate to start there. In one race, eventual regatta winner Adonis tried to win the committee boat (right side). Problem was, he was next to the committee boat at 45 seconds to go. Even with doing a downspeed backup maneuver (backing his boom), he still allowed enough of a gap for me and Adil to safely start to his right. See below.

• Quick bailouts. When getting shot out the back at a start, I’d very quickly bear away and tack onto port and duck boats. Typically when I started my tack, there’d be several boats to duck. But since other boats were bailing onto port at the same time as me, I’d only end up ducking maybe three boats — much less painful.
• Quick parks. If I ended up next to someone prone to backing up (i.e., Adonis), quickly pushing out the boom for a second to stop allowed me enough of a gap that his backups wouldn’t impact me.
• Drive-by snakes. When sailing on port, oftentimes starboard tackers will bear away to keep you from taking their hole. In these cases, it’s best to casually sail by, uninterested, then when you’re off the leeward corner of their boat, in their blind spot (since they’re looking ahead and to leeward), tack and take their hole. Credit to my squadmate James Espey for teaching me this one. Doing this, you need to comply with the rules: approach so there’s a ~five-foot gap between you and the windward boat (so they can initially keep clear), and sail straight until your pivot point (daggerboard) is ahead of theirs. Then slowly luff so that you lock them to windward of you, again while providing them with ample opportunity to keep clear. It’s aggressive but rules compliant.

What didn’t:

• Down-speed weakness. In one start that was pin-favored, Adonis did a downspeed backup, which kept me from moving forward. Not able to match his move, I got shot out the back and had to do one of those bailouts.
• Sloppy rigging. In another start, the tail of my outhaul tie-down line was in front of my timer on the mast. At 20 seconds to the start, I leaned forward to tuck it away. “No harm to fix this, we’re all luffing,” I thought to myself. Bad idea. The boat to windward sheeted in right as I did this. I sheeted in a second too late and got rolled.

What to do differently:

• Get better at downspeed maneuvers on the start line: backups, double-tacks, and half tacks.
• Ensure that your gear is 100% ready for the start. What can go wrong, will.

Upwind

I generally had good upwind legs. I was the first Masters sailor to the windward mark in 3 out of 7 light air (6 to 7 knot) races. Here’s one of those races:

And in the two races I started poorly and was in nearly last, I clawed back and finished third, largely based on my upwind performance.

What worked:

• Rapid optionality. It’s crucial to gain the option to tack on a header as soon as possible. This meant pinching in the flat spots, followed by aggressive footing just before the wave sets. This in turn meant sailing with as much power as possible in the sail, which mean lots of hiking. Even in 6 to 7 knots, I was at max heart rate. The goal is to shed the boats off your hip as fast as possible. Below and in this video is an example of what that looks like, from the last start of the regatta. I’m fourth from the left. Adonis is second from the left. By pinching in the flats and footing through the sets, I was able to gain a lot of gauge (leeward distance) on Adonis so he wouldn’t send me back, and at the same time pinch off Ray and Andres, both to the right of me, while keeping forward speed on Adonis.

• Aggressive, continual, legal kinetics. Looking at Adonis and Ernesto, they’re continually working their boats through the waves. At the tips of the waves, using their tillers and torsos to turn the bow down five degrees to soften the landing.
• Dry bow. Always keep the bow out of an approaching wave by aggressively leaning back to pop up the bow up. This in turn means a strong core, especially in terms of side-to-side movements.
• Punching. When the bow slaps down after a wave, “punch” the mainsheet. Imagine yourself punching someone in the stomach: fist in and then back. That’s the motion: punch your mainsheet hand out fast, then immediately pull it in. This keeps the sail from stalling the moment your speed slows and your apparent wind shifts aft. Then trim back in fast, which is basically a legal pump since your apparent wind is shifting forward.
• Low mode, max power. It’s all too easy to pull the controls in, flatten the sail a bit, not hike so hard, and go into what I call “pinchy pinchy mode”. The problem is that, over time, you’ll lose boatlengths, and in this talented fleet, even at the end of an hourlong race, it’s only a boatlength or two that separates each position. You need to aim for a power profile that lets you sail with your telltales streaming back (as opposed to up, i.e., pinching), no more than 5 degrees of heel, and torso out.
• Lots of cunningham. Brett Bayer (world champion here, in the grandmaster fleet, and a dozen times elsewhere) said to pull just about all wrinkles out of the luff. That meant sailing upwind and pulling the cunningham so that the bottom of the sail was about a centimeter from the top of the gooseneck. Then I saw Adonis pull on his cunningham in about seven knots so that the bottom of the sail was just barely above (1 mm) the gooseneck. So in five knots, I’d be 1 cm above the gooseneck, and in seven I’d be 1 mm above. This helped with getting the crucial low mode.
• Minimal vang. I wanted max power in five to seven knots, and at 185 pounds (84 kilos), I was able to hold the boat flat and foot with just two block vang. This is one of those few times I disagree with International Sailing Academy’s recommendation of two block plus 3 inches. But given that I was able to hang with Ernesto, Adonis, and Brett in these conditions, I’ll go with what worked empirically.
• Prestart testing. Max power means keeping your outhaul at one hand's length out — but no more since that results in a baggy sail that slows you down. Your foot camber is partially a function of cunningham and vang, so I’d first pull on the cunningham and vang per the above, get the mainsheet to two blocked, then adjust the outhaul with a full sail and heeled over. This often meant pulling the outhaul a few millimeters one way or the other, so outhaul markings are crucial (more on that below). Below is an example of that baggy outhaul.

• Play the oscillations. Plenty of time I’d hear competitors ask each other, “did you go right or left?” To me, that was absolutely the wrong way to think of it. Puerto Vallarta, at least this week, was all about playing the oscillations. For instance, everyone says “go right if it’s windy”. Our practice race was the windiest — maybe 15–17 knots. On the first beat, I won the right side of the course. Guess where the top three came from? Left. The next beat, Ernesto stretched his lead by heading left — he was probably just sailed a righty out to the left.

• Correlate compass to angles. Although many headers could be determined solely through the compass, sometimes the heading was bouncing around too much in the waves. In these cases, it was helpful to use the boat angles to corroborate what you were seeing on the compass. Boats to leeward suddenly punched out? You’re in a header.
• Hang it out. Sometimes a lift might take you to one corner or the other. In one race where I got shot out at the start, after ducking the starboard tackers, I saw that we were lifted on port. I kept headed to layline, with the rest of the fleet lifted on my hip. Just before layline, the righty came, and I was back in the hunt.
• Foot through lifts. In one race, I was, as one competitor put it, “in another postal code”, having started left and gotten lucky with a 20-degree lefty. I was trying to foot, but should have done so even more in order to consolidate, by pulling on more cunningham and vang in order to sail lower. A righty came, and as a result, a few boats closed the gap.
• Not overstanding. Before you think, “duh” and skip this paragraph, let me emphasize how hard it is to spot the weather mark in big swells. Now throw in the cognitive impairment that comes with max heart rate in 85-degree air temperature. All too often, competitors would overstand the weather mark. I found it helpful to put the mainsheet in my tiller hand, while in a flat spot, and use my forward hand to help twist my torso and hold that position for several seconds to find the weather mark poke up through the large ocean swells. More than once I saw I was on layline before the boats around me. Below is a photo of three of our fleet (far left of photo) overstanding the weather mark.

• Tacking at top of swells. Head up as you’re going up the swell, then tack at the crest, where there's most wind for you to accelerate.
• Split if behind on last beat. If behind on the short final beat, it almost always made sense to split in order to gain maximum leverage. Conversely, when ahead, it made sense to cover hard on the final beat to protect your gains.

What didn’t:

• Not seizing optionality. In race one, we got headed 10 degrees a few minutes after the start. Ernesto was barely crossing all of us on port, but there were two boats on my hip preventing me from tacking under Ernesto. I asked them to tack, and they didn’t. Why they thought it was a good idea to ignore the current World Champion and eat a header was a good idea, I don’t know. But they zoned out, only tacking on Ernesto’s hip a minute after he crossed. I immediately followed, but then was one of the last boats to get the subsequent righty. From then on, it was an uphill battle.
• Not ducking boats, part 1. In race 4, on the final, short beat, I was on port converging with Orlando. I couldn’t quite cross him. But, I was on the port tack layline to the favored right-hand end of the finish. Take a moment and ask what you’d do in this situation? Duck Orlando, obviously. The problem was, being tired after two hard races, in the heat, I made the wrong move and tacked under Orlando. He in turn pinned me out past the layline to the port end of the finish. As a result, he lost one boat, and I lost four. In the final tally, this one mistake dropped me from 6th overall in Worlds to 7th.
• Not ducking boats, part 2. In another race, I was lifted, on starboard, converging with Ray, on port. He asked if he could cross. I said no. He tacked underneath me, so I had to tack away so I wouldn’t drop back in his leebow. I tacked back after four boatlengths, but Ray locked into a 20-degree lefty and crossed me by several lengths.
• Caught under boom. On day one, in two tacks, I didn’t duck under the boom enough. As a result, I always capsized twice, losing several boatlengths. Super avoidable mistake.
• Messy office. Also on day one, I didn’t make a point of keeping my control lines away from the mainsheet ratchet. At one point, my cunningham got sucked into the rachet, loop and all. I had to cleat off my mainsheet, untie the loop, and pull out the cunningham. Rookie mistake.
• Not assimilating wind data. This one’s a more subtle mistake with a major lesson. In race 12, in the restart, I did a wind shoot and saw a wind heading of 260 degrees. After the start, halfway up the leg, I found myself on starboard between Adonis and Ernesto — good company, right? Our starboard tack heading was about 208, and we were well left of rhumbline. What’s wrong with this picture? A 208 degree heading + 35 tacking angle implies a wind direction of 245 degrees. We were eating a 15-degree header and letting boats get to the right of us. As it turns out, Peter Hurley, who was behind us at the time, got right, and saw a starboard heading of 230, implying a wind direction of 265 degrees. Rather than cruising into oblivion with Ernesto and Adonis, I should have tacked on that 208 heading. Granted, this is a lot of math to do when hiking hard; my workaround is below.
• Dry air wind shadows. At one point, I tacked shy of starboard layline, maybe a dozen boatlengths behind four boats further up the course. I lost out of boats on both sides of me. My hunch is that the dry 85 degrees air in Puerto Vallarta is more easily disturbed than the damp, cold air that we get in Northern California.
• Knotted mainsheet. Sometimes I’d arrive at the weather mark, or reach mark, with a knot that I’d have to untie. This is a function of a couple of things: water in the cockpit, and not cleaning up the mainsheet during calmer parts of the upwind leg. Later in the series, I’d get into the habit of running through the mainsheet about 3/4 up the windward leg, while on the less-bumpy (due to wave skew) starboard tack. Don’t do it sooner, since the mainsheet can re-knot.

What to do differently:

• Watch your heel. Ernesto and I tuned up on the last day of racing. His feedback: on port, I need to watch my heel, especially when at the top of swells and the windspeed increases. Just a few more degrees of heel let him sail higher and faster than me.
• Optionality ASAP.
• Duck. And hydrate and work out enough to minimize fatigue so you can think clearly.
• Get under boom.
• Clean office.
• Table of equivalent headings. On port tack, head to wind, and starboard tack, written on the cockpit. Do checkmarks for each row as you collect data in the prestart — this is a Buddy Melges technique. Collect this data on a regular basis, every two minutes — a Dave Ullman technique. Use your mast timer to remind you of when to get this data.
• Run through mainsheet 3/4 of the way up the course. In Puerto Vallarta, with starboard wave skew, this means starboard layline, or on starboard while approaching the port layline.
• Adjust cunningham for wave skew. In Alameda, I’ll often ease the cunningham on port tack, since the left-skewed waves make port the less bumpy tack. I should have tried that here.

Reaches

What worked:

• Breakaway. Go into the reach with the right mindset: it’s an opportunity to break away from the boats behind so that you can start the run with clear air and lots of options. Some people say that reaches are simply parades —maybe so in slower boats, but in Lasers, a few good waves let you build a gap of several boatlengths. However, it takes max effort, heart rate, and concentration to make it happen.
• High road. The reaches were very tight so you had to commit to the high road to get clear air.

• Narrow band. Andres Heredia (the winner of the apprentice fleet) said that he essentially pointed at the reach mark, with maybe five degrees of variance. Five degrees below rhumbline to surf, and five degrees up from rhumbline when not surfing, such as in a light spot. You don’t want to get stuck too high, slowly reaching down into the reach mark. Here’s an example of how the fleet followed a tight line.

• Aggressive turndown. When a good wave came along, it was crucial to do a quick jerk of the tiller combined with a quick lean out and push forward with your torso. All these would quickly turn your down to align with wave direction to surf. Then lean way back and out, sometimes even with your back touching the deck, to get your bow up.
• Head up on the backside. As the wave passes you by, you’ll be on the backside, going slow. At this point, you’re a sitting duck for other boats to roll you. Compensate for this by doing an upturn (weight forward, on your knees if light, heel to leeward, steer up). As do this, you’re preserving your speed and reloading for the next surf.
• Continual mainsheet trim. Given that raid accelerations and decelerations with surfing and coming off waves, your apparent wind is all over the place. You need to continually trim the mainsheet.
• Cunningham off before the weather mark. Blow the cunningham before you get to the weather mark, while there’s still tension on it. It will rise up on its own, so you’re less likely to need to pull it up on the reach (weight forward = slow) or run.
• Outhaul and vang easily accessible. Some reaches were full-on hiking; these meant that the outhaul had to be kept in the upwind setting. Other reaches were sit-down affairs; for these, it made sense to ease the outhaul to a downwind setting. Still other reaches found us broad-reaching to the end, which meant that the vang had to be eased.
• Aim high. On the second reach, aim a couple of boatlengths above the mark. This dissuades others from going high for the inside route and gives you the ability to turn down at the end to pull on outhaul, cunningham, and vang.

What didn’t:

• Wrong mark. In one race I was first to the mark. I saw just one mark in front of me, maybe 20 boatlengths away. “Wow, this is a short reach,” I thought. Then Adonis blasted over me. “What the hell?” I looked, and it turns out I was pointed at the offset mark for the inside course for the Grandmaster fleet. Adonis found the actual reach mark, and it was about 10 degrees higher than the offset. This isn’t what the course diagram indicated, but race committees make mistakes. I quickly fixed my mistake and headed up, but every place counts in a small fleet.
• Committing to the low road, part 1. In one race, a boat tacked right at the weather mark, outside me. Since he was required by the rules to give me room, I went inside him. Now my bow was locked to his leeward side. This wouldn’t be a big deal for a downwind leg. But on a reach? It meant that I was just a few feet from the crucial high lane, and that enabled a few boats to roll me.
• Committing to the low road, part 2. In another race, it was light and the wind angle was relatively free, making for a broad reach. I chose the low road… good choice, right? Wrong. Mid-leg, the boat right behind me starts going high. It’s rarely a good idea to switch strategies like this mid-leg. The boat behind rolls me since he’s sailing at a faster angle, then slows in the wind shadow of the boats on the high road, locking me into his wind shadow. The perfect way for him to shoot himself in the foot and drag me down with him.
• Not raising board. Often I’d keep the board down so I could hold a high lane on a tight reach. But too often, if the reach was a bit eased, I wouldn’t pull the board up. This was slow. Here’s one example of this mistake by me…

• … and an example of Grandmaster division winner Brett Bayer with his board up since the breeze is a bit further back:

• Janky transitions. Just before one reach mark, Ernesto surfed a wave to get inside rounding on me, then bore away to stay on that same wave downwind. Within 30 seconds, he gained several lengths on me. Beautiful sailing, and in stark contrast to my not catching that same wave, let alone surfing it downwind.
• No clean-up. I wasn’t using calm parts of the reach (between waves) to sort out my cunningham, outhaul, and vang lines into separate piles. Doing this would have enabled me to more quickly adjust controls on the subsequent downwind leg.

What to do differently:

• High road!
• Pre-start, spot the reach mark, and note its position relative to the offset.
• Spot the reach mark before rounding. While a few boatlengths from the mark, look under your boom and locate the reach mark. Is it above the offset?
  - If yes, set up for a tight reach where it’s imperative to hold the high road: board down, or maybe up just a couple of inches; outhaul unchanged (but put tail aft and ready to grab, vang at two-block, cunningham unchanged if nuking but off otherwise.
  - If no (reach mark below offset), set up for broader reach so you can surf: board up, outhaul off a bit (and tail handy), cunningham off, vang at two block or a bit looser.
• Board up if not tight.
• Smoother transitions from reach to run.
• Clean office when not surfing.

Downwind

Ugh, this was the painful leg. I often lost boats. A good leg was one where I lost only a couple of boats. On a typical one, I’d lose a few — a good chunk of a 14-boat fleet. Only on one did I actually pass boats.

What’s interesting is that my downwind has improved a lot in the past few months. In local regattas and in practices, I can often gain on boats. But in the talented worlds fleet, I needed more.

What worked:

• Rhythm. On my best downwind legs, I’d get into a by the lee (BTL) rhythm downwind, where I’d feel a wave coming under me, get on my knees, heel to leeward, on your knees if light, and steer to upturn onto it, catch it. And then heel to windward and steer to downturn and ride the wave face BTL. ABRAT: Always Be Rocking And Turning. Here’s an example of a downwind leg where I quickly got into a good BTL rhythm:

• Proper mainsheet angle. I marked my mainsheet at 90 and around 75 degrees. Most of the time, my sheet was around 75 degrees, for better airflow. One more thing I can thank my squadmates James and Sanjai for helping me figure out.
• Drop sheeting. With a mark at 90 degrees, when sailing on a wave BTL, I could easily drop sheet (i.e., quickly release and then grab the mainsheet) and get a reverse pump to stay on a wave.
• Press forward. On some big waves in light air, it paid to temporarily press down on the deck near the mast, to force the bow down to catch a wave. Combining this with a downturn — heel and tiller to windward — put me on the edge of control but was fast. Olympian Sarah Douglas shows this at one point in this video.
• Gate sights. Sailing out to the course every day, I noted which buildings lined up with the downwind gates. This provided a handy way to ensure that I was steering in their general direction downwind. This is crucial, since, at the top of a mile-long leg, it’s hard to see the waves in the swells when you’re trying your utmost to surf the next wave.
• Kept it legal. I never got a yellow flag for Rule 42 (kinetics), despite plenty of aggressive rocking. That’s because I was always turning — in hindsight, perhaps I was turning too widely, and burning up too much distance. Something to work on.
• Know your umps. I talked to the head umpire, Andrus Poksi, early in the series to get a sense of his knowledge of Rule 42 — pumping, rocking, etc. — as applied to Lasers. One litmus test question: “From where do you watch for Rule 42 violations?” The recommendations from World Sailing is scattered and buried in their ILCA Rule 42 guidelines; even some international-level judges aren’t aware of them. This umpire knew, which was great. Another good question: “Is a BTL drop-sheet considered a pump?” This umpire went on for a couple of minutes talking about there was a debate a few years back, and it was settled that drop sheets are not considered pumps. The point is, if the umpire can nerd out on Rule 42, you can sail aggressively within the rule; if they can’t, sail more conservatively since they might make some bizarre calls. For instance, check out this discussion among judges, where some call reverse pumps illegal.
• Aim for the inside. Often, I’d aim for a point about two boatlengths below the left gate mark, in order to keep my air clear of other boats. Then, once close to the weather mark, I’d upturn onto a broad reach and sail a hot angle through the relatively light air caused by everyone’s wind shadow. Below is a photo of that. The opposite could probably work if BR surfing for to the right gate: keep it high, and then go hot BTL right at the end to sail through bad air.

• Controls early in breeze. In the windy practice race, the waves started to get bigger near the gate as the water got shallower. It paid to start pulling on controls during the calm periods between waves. For instance, outhaul in at ten boatlengths in a flat spot. Then ride a big wave. Then cunningham on at five boatlengths in the next flat spot. Then ride another wave. Then toss vang to the new high side just prior to sheeting in.

What didn’t:

• Missed waves. I’m guessing I missed anywhere from several to a couple of dozen waves each downwind leg, which my competitors were able to catch. This adds up to lost distance. Everyone can catch some waves in PV; the winners catch every wave.

• No surf periods. Nearly every downwind leg, there were times where I wasn’t even finding a wave for several seconds. This was worrisome… were there really no waves around me? Or was I just blind to them? I’d see boats around me surging forward, adding to the urgency.
• Sloopy steering. I wasn’t cognizant enough of rhumbline and wave angle to minimize the distance steered. This might be fine if in the high winds and steep chop of my home waters of San Francisco, where big turns are essential to keep the boat from plowing into the wave head and turning your Laser into a submarine. But in the more subtle five to ten knots that we had, precision steering was key. Reexamining this video by Olympian Sarah Douglas in conditions similar to PV, it’s clear that steering angles need to minimize distance sailed downwind.

• Sloopy transitions. When doing from the reach, it’d take me a while to get into my downwind rhythm. Sometimes I was futzing with a knotted mainsheet. Other times I was clearing up tangled control lines.
• Poor strategy. Ernesto mentioned that before the second downwind, he’d pick the side of the course he’d want to get a lane in. If we were starboard lifted upwind that meant port facing downwind — more breeze blowing in from that side — and do a hard bear-away to BTL to lock in that position and focus on BTL surfing. And vice-versa if rounding in a lefty — choose starboard facing downwind and focus on broad reach (BR) surfing.
• Imprecise lane establishment. It was key to quickly get a lane immediately after the reach mark (or second upwind mark). Sometimes I wouldn’t bear away enough to get a clear BTL lane. Sometimes I’d bear away too much.
• Didn’t always adjust controls. Embarrassingly, sometimes I’d space out and not raise my daggerboard, or blow my cunningham or outhaul. I’d chalk this up to lack of practice, as well as heat plus exhaustion.
• It takes two. In one race, I spend the first part of the downwind leg following Adonis, who was steering for the leeward mark, not the gate. On the ILCA championship course, identify the gate by spotting TWO marks next to each other. Not just one.
• Last-second losses. In at least three races, competitors would break overlaps with me and round ahead at the leeward mark or gate. These conditions are tough, since there’s less wind, due to sailors’ wind shadows, and confused chop from the wake of the umpire boat and other sailors.

What to do differently:

• More careful steering. If you look at the above sections, you’ll see examples of precise steering in the start, upwind, and reach. In my upwind, for instance, I’m talking about the importance of steering low by two or three degrees. Downwind, I’m pretty sloppy. I’ll sail too high or low of rhumbline, which wastes distance. Or I won’t align with waves to surf them. Below is one example. I round second (first Master) and then head off 30 degrees from the fleet, presumably to build rig load:

• … and it didn’t work. Here’s a video grab from later in that leg. I’m on the far left; Adil, in the middle, rounded a few boatlengths behind me, and now he’s way ahead:

• … and by the end of the downwind leg, Ernesto and Adonis both passed me. See below. I’m the small boat in the middle.

• Banded upturns and downturns. When it’s light downwind (five to ten knots), do your BTL surfing while staying below dead downwind (DDW). I’m not sure how close to DDW you can get — is it five degrees? Ten? — but you want to avoid the DDW “no-flow zone” where the airflow across your sail is minimal and slow. Conversely, do your broad reach (BR) surfing while staying away from the DDW no-flow zone.
• Careful DDW crosses. Until the course is really skewed, at some point, you’re doing to need to shift from BTL surfing to BR surfing, or vice versa. Only cross DDW when there’s plenty of airflow. This is because a transition from DDW means an airflow reversal on the sail. If it’s windy (see: San Francisco Bay) this reversal is almost instant and doesn’t slow you down relative to surfing a wave or staying upright. In lighter air like PV, it takes a few seconds, which means a period of time when your sail isn’t providing drive. What Adonis and Andres mentioned is that they wait until they’re in relatively high wind (say, a ten-knot puff on a predominately eight-knot leg) or on an exceptionally good wave, in order to do a DDW cross and start to reconnect to the rhumbline.
• Think like a keelboat driver. This might seem like bad advice for a lightweight boat like a Laser but stay with me. In keelboats in light air, you’ve been solid at precisely steering a boat as low as possible to the point just before the leeward sheet of the kite sags, and then steering up a few degrees to reestablish kite pressure. Conversely, you’ve been frustrated many times as a kite trimmer, calling out, “puff on, soak down” and the driver obliviously sails an unnecessarily hot angle through a puff. Too often in Lasers in light air, you’ve been too little of the former and too little of the latter. You need to sensitize to rig load so that you find the lowest angle that still keeps pressure on your sail. And don’t sail too hot for too long after you have speed.
• Consider when board up. On one downwind leg, Andres had his board up to almost a flat-water position. He later said this was because, on that leg, he was going to be barely turning and didn’t need much daggerboard.

Side note on kinetics:

• Ernesto raised an interesting Rule 42 question: if you’re surfing BTL, drop sheet, sheet in (not an aggressive pump), then drop sheet again, is that considered pumping while already surfing, and blocked by Rule 42? Another good Rule 42 litmus test question in order to see what kind of umpires you have.

Scheduling

What worked:

• Super structured. After almost missing the practice race the first day (see below), I went into Google Calendar and laid out a structure for each day: when to wake up, eat breakfast, rig up, attend the daily sailors briefing, get dressed, sail out, and tune up. Put in as many details as possible: taping hands, what to bring to the boat, etc. I allowed thirty minutes to sail to the course, and sixty minutes to tune up pre-start. Then I outlined when to fill up water bottles for the day ahead and hit the sack for ten hours of sleep.
• One of the first. Once I set up a detailed schedule, I’d follow it closely so that I could end up being one of the first boats to leave the harbor. Getting to the race course early gave me lots of time to reflect on my performance, doing a mental inventory similar to what you’ve read above: what worked, what didn’t, and what to do better. It gave me a chance to get lots of port tack heading info, practice my mainsheet clearing, get a gate sight, and then later tune up with other boats. It’s a huge confidence booster to be arriving at the weather mark and see competitors still leaving the harbor. It gave me a chance to hydrate 15 minutes before the start.

What didn’t:

• Arriving too late. We arrived the day before the practice race. It took us longer to get from PVR airport to our hotel room (four hours) as it did to fly from SFO to PVR. There were people in the airport who said they’d help us find our shuttle, then give us tequila shots and try to scam us into buying vacation tours. See photo below. Then it took us an hour to check-in at the hotel, Paradise Village. I had allowed three hours to get my charter boat ready for the 5:30 pm equipment inspection but missed my appointment.

• Incomplete prep. Given the backlog above, I never had enough time to do a full prep. I didn’t have time to polish my hull, blades, and spars with McLube; didn’t tape over the bailer; and didn’t tighten the rudder bolts. I didn’t have time to properly unpack, sailed out to the practice race with two left-hand gloves, and made the practice start with only five minutes to spare. (But still got a good start — many thanks to the Treasure Island Vanguard 15 fleet for helping me become a better starter!)

What to do differently:

• Arrive earlier. Arrive at least the day prior to getting your charter boat, to allow enough time to unpack, with plenty of time to set up your charter boat prior to inspection.
• Write out your schedule BEFORE you fly down, based on the notice of race and sailing instructions.

Heat Management

Given how physical the Laser is, and Puerto Vallarta’s warm temperatures — 85 degrees Fahrenheit / 29 degrees celsius — it was clear that it was going to be crucial for dealing with the heat. I’d spent time racing Lasers in Singapore and was astounded by how much water I’d drink.

As one sailor who recently moved from San Francisco to Puerto Vallarta put it, “I think we've gotten to be good at being camels”. Meanwhile, I was a sea otter, adapted to racing in 53-degree water wearing 7mm of neoprene.

We saw this hot weather adaptation among the sailors, with Adi Khalid of the United Arab Emirates and Adonis of Greece wearing dark clothing, with cold weather sailors like myself dressed in white.

What worked:

• Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate! I got four big 48-ounce Nalgene bottles, drinking their contents through a day. That’s 1.5 gallons in 24 hours. Here’s the breakdown:
  - Bottle one: Hammer HEED, drunk during breakfast. Caffeinated, so no need for coffee.
  - Bottle two: three packs of Maurten Drink Mix 320 Caf 100–40% drunk before race one, 60% drunk before race two.
  - Bottle three: Hammer Recoverite, drunk after arriving onshore.
  - Bottle four: water with a packet of Emergen-C to keep my immunity up during a long regatta, which I’d drink during the course of the night.
  As Peter Vessella put it, “you have to pound water”. One key metric: pee at least once on the way to the race course, to ensure you’re starting out hydrated.

• Safe transport. Since the Hammer powders come in massive plastic containers, I scooped out just what I needed into plastic baggies, then put them into the Nalgene bottles so that nothing would escape. I was worried that airport security would ask about white powder being transported in baggies, but there were no such questions.
• Big bottles of water. Figure out where to buy big bottles of water before you travel to the regatta. In our case, there was a grocery store a five-minute walk from the venue, with big gallon size bottles. People claim that you can drink PV water from the tap, but there was no need to take a risk. (Indeed, after the last night of the regatta, when we got cocktails with ice, our stomachs started getting gurgly.)

• Water boat. Before the regatta, I lined up ten sailors to go in on a water/food/spare parts boat, pictured below, to carry all our water, gear, and spare parts. It was driven by a local Laser dad. This was a lot cheaper than a coach — about USD 300 per person for seven days ($42/day) — and saved each of us from having to carry a liter and a half of water, which weighs about seven pounds.

• White clothing. White jogging cap, white Huk neck gaiter, and white nylon shirt. I had a somewhat loose-fitting long sleeve white that I wore over my lifejacket. You can see an example of this below. For next time I’m in hot conditions, I want to get a stretchy white rashguard that doesn’t flop around as much in the breeze. I should also get some warm weather hiking pants, such as the SEA Airprene hiking pants.

• Protect the chest. One thing I learned racing Lasers in hot Singaporean conditions years ago: never race without a rash guard under your lifejacket. Nipple rashes are no fun.
• Sunscreen applied, multiple times. Before heading to breakfast, I’d apply some 50 SPF sunscreen with zinc. Then repeat a couple of hours later, after rigging up and getting dressed.
• Get dressed cold. I’d get dressed in my air-conditioned hotel room near the venue, then hang out there when we were on a no-wind delay. Much better than roasting in the sun! Another tip, from Olympian Wolfgang Gerz, is to get dressed with the shower running since evaporation is a cooling process.
• Hose off pre-splash. Before you wheel your boat down the ramp, hose off from your head down with water.
• Goat tape. Used by weightlifters to prevent blisters. I didn’t use this for the first two days, got a blister, then used it for the next five days, under my gloves, and had no issues going forward.

• Keep it clean. All that hydrating means a lot of fluids coming out, and over a seven-day regatta, clothes can start smelling funky. I bought some detergent at the nearby grocery store, and almost always had clothes soaking in soapy water in the kitchen sink. Since I brought an extra mainsheet, I had a nice long clothesline to let everything dry off.

What didn’t:

• No dishwasher. Don’t ever put Nalgene bottles into the dishwasher. 19 times out of 20, nothing will happen. Then one time, you’ll end up with a warped and useless bottle when there’s a random jet of hot water that bounced off something and sprayed on your bottle. After returning home, I put my bottles into the dishwasher to give them a final cleaning, and some of them got warped.
• Hydrate on the plane. I should have started hydration on the flight by bringing an empty Nalgene bottle with me through SFO security, and then filling it up in the airport. Then pound the water starting on our descent. This would have kept me ahead of the dehydration curve that probably led me to make stupid mistakes (near capsizes, cunningham cluster) on day one.
• Generous scoops. I almost ran out of Hammer HEED and Recoverite powder. In hindsight, there’s no harm in putting a few extra scoops into your bag.

What to do differently:

• Hydrate earlier
• White rashguard
• Airprene hiking pants
• Hand wash the Nalgenes
• More electrolytes

Fitness

It’s funny — I spent more time in a gym than on the water to prepare for this regatta, but I don’t have a lot to say about it.

What worked:

• Surgery. Carpal tunnel and elbow surgery the previous fall meant that I no longer had numbness. Huge improvement.
• Broader fitness. Unlike in 2021, where I focused on my legs and cardio, this time I focused more on overall fitness: legs, lungs, arms, core, and hip flexors. Worked much better.
• Heart rate tracking. I used an Apple Watch to track my workouts, both in the gym and for on-the-water practices. I made it a goal to ensure that I was close to max heart rate as much as possible the entire time. I use Strava to track my stats.
• Everything is practice. That quote from Pele has always resonated with me. I try to fit in fitness time wherever possible. A standing desk with a balance board that I’ll work at several hours a day. A Prohands Gripmaster XX-Heavy tension that I’ll use in meetings or in the car. Exercise equipment at home, in case I don’t have time to get to the gym.

What didn’t:

• Cramps. I got cramps on some of the race days, despite my extensive hydration program above. Mid-regatta, I started eating two bananas a day, and the cramps went away.

What to do differently:

• Bananas.
• More workouts. If you see Adonis and Ernesto, you’ll see it’s no mistake they were way ahead of the rest of the fleet in terms of conditioning. I’ve got a ways to go to get to their level.
• More core. In a lot of photos, I don't feel like my torso is far enough out upwind, and I’m not agile enough downwind. More core work could help.

Gear

Those of you who’ve met me know that I geek out on gear. It’s a good thing I don’t sail a truly technical boat like a 505 since I’d probably never get out on the water. I’ve organized this roughly bow-to-stern:

What worked:

• Compass. I’m not normally a compass guy. But I heard that a compass was essential to PV, so I bought a Velocitek Prism with a Carbonparts mount. While not cheap, it was essential, both for finding the favored end of the line as well as shifts. If I had to pick out one standout piece of gear for this regatta, it was the compass. It has a feature I call JFC: Just a Funking Compass. No GPS, no timer, no backlight, nothing to go wrong. Just a heading, all the time. I already have a countdown timer on my wrist and on the mast; I don’t need a third one.

• Mark compass. I put two small marks on the compass. On the right side, “- H” — meaning, when the numbers go down, that’s a header (on starboard). And on the left, “+ H”, indicating that higher numbers on port are a header. It’s one of those little things that keep you from making boneheaded mistakes when tired. See below.

• Standby gear. When I started practicing a lot for Worlds, I started wearing out my gear. I found it best to have “standby gear”. I’d keep using my old gear in practice until it completely wears out, but swap in the new standby gear during races. It’s no big deal if a part fails in practice, but is if it fails while racing, especially in a world championship. I applied this thinking to my hiking pants and (eventually) mainsheet.
• Spare wind indicators. C-vanes are essential to proper downwind sailing, but the yellow vanes break way too easily. I went down with three spares, and sure enough, one of them broke. Really frustrating.

• Shock cord for mast retainer. When returning to the dock at Vallarta Yacht Club, the wind would come from all directions. After removing the mainsheet, the boom would often do a full 360-degree rotation. Using shock cord, rather than a rope, for the mandated “safety” line meant that it wouldn’t yank out the blocks at the base of my mast. We call this a “spevak”, after my unfortunate friend Walt Spevak, who got his cunningham and outhaul blocks pulled out of the deck in the middle of last year’s ILCA North Americans. When rigging a spevak, keep the shockcord thin (1–2mm) to reduce every last gram of weight. No, your mast won’t fall out if you have a shockcord… take it from this San Francisco sailor who’s capsized plenty: the cunningham and outhaul are plenty to ensure that your mast stays in.
• Proper telltales. I found that the wool telltales that come with a Laser sail are slower to respond than cassette tape (still sold on Amazon!). Also, they are placed a couple of feet from where the sail initially bubbles in a luff. So, I got an old cassette tape, and place them right where you first see the sail bubble. The result: more instantaneous feedback if your sail is over- or under-trimmed.

• … here’s what those telltales look like. See lead boat, 158976:

• Mark vang, per the ISA video guidelines.
• Mark outhaul. Using electrical tape on the boom, I set up marks for various outhaul settings. This allowed me to precisely lock in the right setting at a leeward mark rounding, and to fine-tune settings upwind. The black (i.e., base setting) tape band is for when the foot is one-hands-length (6 inches) from the boom, red is the max in you’d ever have (foot half a centimeter from the boom), with blue and green each at 1/3 and 2/3 of those extremes. I rig my outhaul similar to Pavlos Kontides, with the purchase forward and under the boom, so that I can easily gauge the setting on both tacks. Max out (the loop at the end of the outhaul secondary) is set so that there’s one “shaka” length from the bearing point of the aft fairlead and the edge of the luff.
• Mark cunningham. Similar to the outhaul, this was essential at leeward mark roundings. Using tape on the mast, I set up marks for cunningham settings. Black (base setting) marks the bottom of the luff when pulled hand tight. Red tape is touching the top of the gooseneck. Blue and green are each at 1/3 and 2/3 of those extremes. Max out (the loop at the end of the cunningham secondary) is such that the cunningham rises two inches from black; that feeds enough slack to the sail when going downwind without excessive wrinkles. Below you can see examples of my cunningham marks on my mast (nearly covered up) and outhaul marks on my boom.

• Smooth cunningham functions. I set the cunningham primary so that the double block is even with the gooseneck bolt when at base (black/hand tight) setting. This means that the double block shouldn’t rise much (if at all) above the gooseneck when at max ease, which could lead to problems with the blocks getting caught on the top of the gooseneck when pulling the cunningham on at the leeward mark. It also gives enough “throw” to pull the cunningham on tight in heavy air. Also, I use old-school duct tape to keep the cunningham out of the gap between the gooseneck and the boom. Lastly, I rig the cunningham primary on either side of the boom, with the primary outside of the outhaul block line, so that I can quickly pull off slack downwind.
• Mark mainsheet. 90 degrees and 75 degrees. 75 is a typical setting for BTL and BR, while 90 degrees is a good reference for drop sheeting.
• Mainsheet cleats. This one’s bound to be controversial, but I had the charter folks rig up mainsheet cleats as far forward as allowed in the ILCA rules. The cleats are small enough to not get in the way when sailing downwind. And yet they let me rest my arms when sailing out to the race course. They also make it easier to clear the mainsheet when approaching the weather mark.
• Max leech tension. I have a thick traveler line, I think SK-99 Dyneema 4mm, and I tie the loop as tightly as possible. Every day, I’ll re-tie the line since the half-hitch will slip a bit. To get the trav extra tight, I’ll pull up on the section of the trav between the loop and cleat. This means my tape on the tiller will wear out nearly daily, so that’s another rig-up task. Additionally, I’ll get the clew strap super tight by laying the outhaul grommet on its side; this lets me get the sail down a few more millimeters on the boom.
• Old Laser tiller. There have been some questions about whether tillers made for older LaserPerformance boats would work well on the new ILCA hulls made in Thailand, which put the rudder gudgeons and transom slope at one end of the tolerances. Southeast Sailboats did a great evaluation of this question, with the conclusion that a new Rooster ILCA tiller is 6mm lower than an older Rooster Laser tiller. That’s half a centimeter. I didn’t find this to be an issue in my upwind performance. Most of the time, my traveler block was touching the deck upwind; check out the photo below.

• Lots of duct tape. I used duct tape to repair my shredded golf bag (used to transport my tiller, sail, lines, and sailing clothes), tape down my compass every day (photo below), and keep the cunningham clear.

What didn’t:

• Mainsheet. A couple of minutes before the first race on day two, I saw that my mainsheet was almost completely shredded where it goes through the ratchet block. It was fine when I left the dock but rapidly deteriorated on the sail out. Thankfully, our first attempt at a start was a general recall, so I had time to swap ends of the mainsheet. Later that evening, I swapped in my new mainsheet, which I had on standby. (For my mainsheet, I use the yellow Rooster Polilite 6mm rope that pretty much everyone uses.)
• Mast timer. To be clear, my mast timer worked, but after seven years, it’s getting condensation if I leave it in the cockpit. Time to get another one to have on standby. I can keep using my old one in practice.

• Compass velcro. Just before one of my races, I quickly raised my board up and down to remove any seaweed or debris that might have wrapped around it. Bad idea: my compass completely pulled off, bringing the velcro pads with it. I looked at a number of different ideas but settled on the idea of mounting my compass in front of the mast in the future. That way, I can do kelp and weed checks all day without the compass coming off. It’ll also keep it away from the vang, outhaul, and cunningham lines. I’ll have a safety line attached to it in the off chance that someone knocks it off with their boom. I’ll use a bunch more velcro, found on Amazon. I’m using Gorilla Glue to help the smaller pieces of velcro stick to the base. Here’s a photo of the base; the original velcro pads are black; the new velcro is clear.

What to do differently:

• Always use standby gear in races and old gear in practices.
• Buy standby mast timer.
• Compass in front of mast.
• Rooster tiller extension. My current Acme extension hasn’t broken — yet. But I’ve broken them in the past, and Roosters are stronger.

Miscellaneous

Some last few thoughts:

• Best restaurant. The Iguana Restaurant and Tequila Bar is one of the best, if not the best, restaurant in Puerto Vallarta. It’s about 45 minutes from Vallarta Yacht Club, so ask your hotel concierge to set up a reservation during your lay day. Check out the view below.

• Best place for gifts. Vallarta Chocolate Factory has amazing chocolates, and great gifts for friends and family back home. In particular, they have hot chocolate tablets, which will survive the hot trip back to your hotel better than chocolates. If you’re doing a regatta and burning thousands more calories a day than usual (i.e., assuming you’re hiking hard and carrying max power), then this is a great place to splurge on some extra calories. Zoom in to the offerings below.

• COVID tests are easily obtained in Paradise Village, the hotel complex where we stayed during the regatta, near the Tulum restaurant. They have both PCR and antigen. Antigen tests are old-style “brain ticklers”… eesh!
• Pregame: Always grab the free dinner at the yacht club after racing, even if you’re planning to eat later at a restaurant. I find my appetite spikes during regattas due to the four or so hours of on-the-water activity. Hot items only, to be safe.
• Sea life. Puerto Vallarta’s sea life is… varied:
  - Sailing out to the venue, I’d often see fish jumping out of the water. In the windy downwind legs in the practice races, fish were leaping out of the water to get out of my way. Both magical.
  - On one upwind leg, the side of my boat hit a sting ray, who seemed to get pissed off and slap his stinger. Thankfully he was on my leeward side, four feet from my feet.
  - On another upwind, I hit something hard with my daggerboard, presumably the shell of a sea turtle.
  - And every day, I’d see at least one dead fish floating in the water, which was curious since I didn’t see any signs of pollution. Makes me appreciate San Francisco Bay’s recent renaissance, with regular sightings of dolphins and humpback whales in the bay itself.

Conclusion

Laser / ILCA Masters Worlds was a great regatta. It was great to race against some of the best in our class, and as you saw above, many are open to sharing their expertise. It’s a great learning experience and a good way to renew old friendships while making new ones. It’s worth noting that there wasn’t a single protest the entire week.

The next Laser / ILCA Masters Worlds will be in February 2023, at Royal Varuna Yacht Club in Pattaya, Thailand. Conditions will be similar to Puerto Vallarta. A bit hotter, with highs of 88 degrees (31 Celsius) and lows of 76 (24 Celsius). Roughly the same breeze, averaging 9 knots.

To prepare, I want to do lots of practice sessions with short courses, with downwind legs no more than one or two minutes. This forces a level of intensity that’s easily lost with longer courses. I’ll need to master transitions at marks, immediately find a rhythm downwind, and address all the improvement points listed above.

I can’t wait to start the preparation!

This begs the question:

Is DownDetector reliable?

On one hand, DownDetector users that report their experience on a site will pick up on all kinds of issues that a monitoring bot might miss.

On the other, you’re counting on those users to be technically competent. They might not be able to access a particular site because they have an issue with their browser, laptop, phone, tablet, WiFi router, VPN, Internet provider, DNS, virus scanner, or content filter. That’s a lot of potential failure points! Some users might misattribute a problem to a website when the root cause is actually something else.

DownDetector claims to get around this problem by only reporting a website is down when more people than usual report a problem. This sounds reasonable at first until you consider that most websites have some kind of business cycle. For example:

• Retailers have Cyber Monday
• Tax prep sites (in the US) have the April 15 filing deadline
• Superbowl advertisers get a flood of users when their spot runs
• Sports sites get a flood of users during big games
• … and so on.

In all these instances, DownDetector can falsely report a website as being down, even when it’s fine. Here’s why:

DownDetector lacks crucial information.

Here’s the math: suppose a retailer normally gets 1000 users a day and just one of them reports an issue on DownDetector. That’s an error rate of 1%.

Then, on Cyber Monday, they get 100k users. 100 of those users report an issue on DownDetector. It’s the same 1% error rate. But to DownDetector, it appears to be a surge in problems, and they report it as such — incorrectly.

It boils down to a math issue: DownDetector knows the nominator (number of users reporting an issue) but not the denominator (total number of site visitors) so they can’t reliably report an error rate.

Sometimes this leads to embarrassing walk-backs, like this time in 2022 when DownDetector parent Ookla had to walk back their claim that AWS had an outage.

Is DownDetector safe?

Yes, DownDetector is safe. It doesn’t install anything on your computer or attempt to infect it with a virus. DownDetector is owned by Ookla, which in turn is owned by Ziff-Davis, a reputable online publisher that’s nearly 100 years old and is publicly traded on NASDAQ, ticker symbol ZD.

Given DownDetector’s shortcomings, what alternatives might you consider?

How to determine if a website is up or down

The best way to figure out if a website is actually down is to look at three types of information:

1. User sentiment, such as DownDetector and on Twitter (search for “company-name down” and “company-name outage”).
2. Monitoring websites, such as Downhound.
3. Website status pages. Some websites publish their current uptime on a status page. Google for “company-name status page”.

Monitoring websites won’t catch every issue, but when they indicate that a site is having an issue, it most likely is. All the above issues with user reporting (problems with browser, device, etc.) don’t exist since they monitor using simple, reliable bots in the cloud.

Website status pages often are slow to update. For example, Apple’s status page is notoriously slow to report issues, if they do at all. But when they do report an issue, you know there’s a problem.

Example: Apple

Putting this all together, let’s say we want to see if Apple is down. We could do the following:

• Check the various DownDetector pages for Apple
• Do a Twitter search for “apple down” (pretty noisy) and “apple outage” (better). Click on Latest to get the most up-to-date results.
• Check the Downhound page for Apple
• Check Apple’s own status page

Conclusion

Yes, this is admittedly a lot of work just to see if a website is down. But as I write this, there’s currently no way to check all three kinds of information — user sentiment, monitoring, and status pages — all in one place.

Hope this was helpful. If you like, please give me some claps!

Recently, a friend asked me about this chart, showing how quickly a hacker can guess a password:

She had two questions:

Is this accurate?

If so, what to do about it?

The answer to first question: Yes, it’s accurate. If anything, it’s worse.

State-sponsored theft

Some people blow off password security with something like, “I don’t care if a hacker sees my vacation photos.”

And you’d be right. But that’s not what they’re after.

They want your money. In your online bank accounts, in your investment accounts.

Your life savings. protected by… a password.

I’m not exaggerating. In 2021, North Korean hackers stole $400M. In 2016, North Korea tried to steal $1B from Bangladesh, among the poorest countries in the world.

If these hackers have no compunction to steal from poor Bangladeshis, they have zero hesitation about stealing from you.

Most of this theft comes from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean hackers. These countries see you as a source of income to fund their authoritarian governments.

That’s what you’re up against.

You’ve probably already been hacked

Today, hackers get lists of literally hundreds, thousands, even millions of credentials on the dark web, which other hackers have posted. Here are just a few of these hacked credentials collections.

For example, the password for john.doe@gmail.com is already published on the dark web, according to security research site Have I Been Pwned. (Pwned is security-speak for “owned”, as in, I own you.)

Because of this, any hacker can get Mr. Doe’s password.

Now, if John Doe has changed his password since it’s been stolen and published, he’s okay. But if he hasn’t, hackers can log into whatever accounts use that stolen password.

Your turn: look up your email on Have I Been Pwned

1. Point your browser to https://haveibeenpwned.com/
2. Enter your email address
3. Cringe

Wait, is this site sketchy?

Great question! If you’ve asked it, you’re already developing a security mindset, which is awesome.

The answer: No, not sketchy.

HaveIBeenPwned is run by Troy Hunt, a security researcher who runs this site. He’s kind of a big deal in the security world given the value of his website. Here’s his LinkedIn profile, Wikipedia page, and home page. Legit, right?

But who cares if hackers see my photos

And I don’t either. I don’t care if someone hacks into your Giphy account to look at animated cats — but if your Giphy account uses the same password as your bank, you’re hosed.

Here’s the difference between you and me:

You probably use the same passwords for random consumer websites and financial sites that really matter to hackers.

But I don’t. (And I’ll show you my techniques below.)

Why does this matter?

Let’s say you, me, and John Doe all use the same consumer website for photo sharing. It gets hacked. Because all sites do. (Even the NSA.)

So, hackers get John's username and password for that consumer website. Let’s say John’s username is john.doe@gmail.com and his password is fluffybunny.

Hackers will write a software program to take that same username/password combination and try it to log into:

1. chase.com
2. bankofamerica.com
3. wellsfargo.com

… and so on, going down the list of the biggest banks. Then they’ll repeat for all the other username/password combinations they have.

And they have a lot. How many? Our boy Troy says there are over 11 Billion hacked username/password combos:

Most of these login attempts fail. But that’s okay. Software programs run tirelessly, 24/7. If just 1% work, that’s enough to set up a funds transfer and steal money.

And if your bank account is hacked — do you think you’ll get your money back from hackers backed by an adversarial foreign government armed with nuclear weapons?

Good luck with that.

You’re literally dealing with nuclear-armed gangsters.

—

So what should you do?

If you want to protect your money from hackers, follow these principles:

Unique and strong

Have a UNIQUE, STRONG password for EVERY website you use.

Let’s repeat that:

• Unique: different password for each site.
• Strong: hard for a hacker to guess.
• Every: do this diligently for every site.

Since every website will get hacked, you need to firewall the damage from a hack to just that one site.

Write it down

Using a different, strong password for each site means you cannot remember each password. You need to write it down, in an app that’s well-protected, from which you can copy/paste.

I’ll explain below which app, and what I mean by “well-protected”.

Max out the length

When you register for a website, max out the password length. Start with the longest possible password in the 1Password password generator, which is around 60 characters, and cut it down if the password is rejected for being too long. Here’s what one of their long passwords looks like:

An example:

Recently, I registered for the California DMV site. They rejected my 60 character password. The error message stated that the max length was 20 characters, and had to include a number.

So I copied and pasted my 60 character password into a text editor, took the first 19 characters, and slapped a number at the end. Continuing with the example, here’s what that looks like:

Fres-zapt-firt-doun8

(Obviously, none of the passwords listed here are my actual ones.)

On the other hand, many companies now support long passwords. Google’s one example; your Gmail account should have a 60 character password (if not longer).

Start out long, then cut down as needed.

Use copy/paste

Most of the time, you won’t be typing out my passwords. You’ll copy and paste. It’s the same action to copy and paste whether the password is 10 characters or 60. So make it as long as you can.

Use the keyboard

Whatever app you use to store your passwords, you’ll have the ability to use the keyboard to select and copy the password, and then paste it into a web page.

Learn these now, because it will be more reliable to select all with the keyboard, making sure you don’t miss any characters. And copy/paste is a lot faster with the keyboard.

On a PC, your keystrokes will be:

• Select all: ctrl-a
• Copy: ctrl-c
• Paste: ctrl-v

On a Mac:

• Select all: command-a
• Copy: command-c
• Paste: command-v

Nerd alert; feel free to skip

Some of you might look at the chart at the top of this post and notice that an 18 character password will take trillions of years to crack. That’s true. But computers are always getting faster. And quantum computers might end up being really fast, to the point where the US government is concerned.

Long story short: the time it takes to copy and paste 18 characters as it is for 60 characters. So just make it long.

Easy to type

Some websites stupidly make it so that you can’t copy/paste into the password field. To handle these cases, I set up the 1password generator to create a “memorable password” with words separated by dashes, with a capital letter thrown in. Here’s what that looks like:

Breaking up a long password with dashes means that you can easily check each “chunk” to ensure you’ve typed it in properly.

Why uncheck “Full words”? Because there are only around 4000 four-letter words in a typical English dictionary. But if you ignore that constraint, you can make many more words. That makes it harder for a hacker’s computer program to guess.

Reduce Apple iCloud risk

For passwords, one of the biggest risks is around Apple iCloud. You can’t copy/paste these into your phone. Nor can you see what you’re typing aside from black circles. Here’s the screen I’m talking about:

It’s easy to mess up typing a long password, so you have to go with something easy to type, yet short enough not to mistype.

What I do is use the 1password generator to generate three words separated by a dash (example: Darm-twec-chum) and add a number at the end (Darm-twec-chum9). Of course, this password is unique to Apple iCloud.

Here’s what that looks like:

It’s frustrating that Apple impedes security for billions of users by preventing us from discouraging us from using long passwords, but such is life.

Use text messages in addition to passwords

Whenever you can authenticate using a text message sent to your phone, in addition to your password, use it. This way, even if a hacker gets your password, they still can’t get into your account.

(You might have heard of this as 2-factor authentication or 2FA for short.)

Don’t remember

Often you’ll see a checkbox saying something along the lines of“Don’t ask again for this device” or “Remember this browser”.

When you check this box, it means that you won’t get a text message next time you try to log in. If someone steals your laptop, they’ll be able to login with just your password; no text message will be sent.

For this reason, I prefer to leave these boxes unchecked. It’s one more barrier for a hacker. Again, we’re talking about motivated, state-sponsored hackers.

Use FaceID to log into apps

Some iPhone apps support the iPhone’s FaceID to log in. This is a great thing to set up whenever possible— convenient and secure.

Some apps, like WhatsApp, prompt you to use FaceID, making it super easy to set up. Other apps, like Dropbox and Evernote, bury this setting in the preferences for some reason, making this great capability less frequently used.

As I write this in 2022, there are dozens of iPhone apps that support FaceID, including:

• WhatsApp
• PayPal
• Amazon
• Dropbox
• Hilton
• United
• JetBlue
• Verizon
• Notability
• Evernote
• Apple App Store
• Apple Wallet
• 1password
• Google Authenticator
• Google Chrome

It’s hard to overemphasize how great FaceID is for security. It’s strong and simple. If every website supported it, I wouldn’t need to be writing this article!

One question with Face ID is, when I’m asleep, can someone hold my phone to my face and unlock my phone? To prevent this, turn on “Require Attention for Face ID”. To do this:

1. Open the iPhone’s Settings app
2. Swipe down
3. Search for “FaceID”
4. Choose “FaceID & Passcode”
5. Scroll down
6. Turn on Require Attention for Face ID

Store your passwords

Where to store your passwords?

Some people like Evernote, since it is available as a phone app, laptop app, and website. This makes it more flexible to copy/paste passwords.

Google Sheets is another good choice as a password repository, given Google’s strong security practices, ability to share sheets for shared logins, apps for iPhone and Android, and support for text messages in the login process.

Notion is another app that’s recently gotten attention, though I haven’t used it.

Secure your password store

Whatever you use to store your password, you need to heavily secure it using the techniques above. Long, unique password. Text messages.

You’ll find yourself logging into your password store all the time. For this reason, I’ve found it helpful to have a long password that’s actually a sentence composed of many words. For example:

My dog is a poodle and has a name of spot

Easy to for me to remember, but hard for a hacker’s script to guess.

Because it’s easy for me to remember, I don’t need to write it down anywhere on my phone or laptop.

Your master passphrase should focus on one concept

If you talk to your techie friends, they might point out the geek-famous correct horse battery staple comic that’s been influential among security folks.

My only gripe with pass phrases like “correct horse battery staple” is that they’re hard to remember. What the heck is a battery staple, and why am I talking to a horse?

Instead, I find it easier to zero in on one concept — like a pet, or friend, or city — and make a short description of it your passphrase. Like this:

i nearly froze my ears off one january in chicago

my best friends mom taught philosophy in arizona

… you get the point.

I keep them lowercase to make typing easier. I leave out the apostrophe in friend’s, since they can cause issues in apps.

You can skip the spaces if you like, or if the app you use for your password store doesn’t accept spaces.

The cool thing is that these phrases are really long — over 40 characters — which takes today’s computer’s over trillions of years to guess.

Use Spotlight when typing out your master passphrase

On the Mac there’s a feature called Spotlight. You can quickly bring it up by typing command-space:

You can use Spotlight to type out your long master passphrase in plain letters (not asterisks) to ensure that you’ve spelled it right.

Then, use your command-a/command-c technique to reliably select and copy the entire phrase:

From here, you can paste the long phrase into your login for whatever you use to store your passwords — Evernote, Google Sheets, etc. — using command-v.

Sounds complicated, but once you build the muscle memory, it’s quick.

I haven’t tried any of these, but here are some rough equivalents for Spotlight than run on Windows. Just make sure they don’t present your master password through any kind of saved history.

Don’t get locked out of your password store

Now what I become unconscious (or worse) and my loved ones need to access my accounts?

For this scenario, I write out — when pen and paper, completely analog— my password store’s password on a piece of paper. It’s hidden in my home, somewhere safe, where some trusted contacts know where to find it.

Whatever you do, don’t use a printer to print out this password. You don’t want it ever being typed into a computer.

Stay organized

I know someone who once wrote all their passwords on a single index card. This got messy and unreadable as the number of passwords grew, and changed over time.

Instead, have one Evernote record, or Google Sheets row, per website and person. For example, I have separate notes for my DMV account and for my kids.

For each password note, I write the date of when I created the password. Some websites will occasionally expire passwords on their own, and it’s helpful to know if a password is old or not.

Secure, unique phone PIN

Since your phone will have all your passwords in your Evernote, Google Sheets, Notion, or some other app, put a strong PIN (7–8 characters) on your phone.

This way, if someone steals your phone, it will be hard for them to guess your PIN before they’re locked out after too many incorrect guesses.

Of course, this PIN should be unique to your phone and not the same as any of your passwords.

And, turn on FaceID or TouchID, if your phone has one of them.

Secure, unique laptop password

Put a semi-strong, unique password on your laptop. I use 1password generator to create a three-word password. Easy enough to type frequently, but hard for a hacker to guess if they steal your laptop, without eventually getting locked out from too many incorrect attempts. Here’s what that looks like:

Extra credit: password manager

A password manager, like 1password password manager, can be a handy way to store passwords securely and make it quicker to log into websites with long, unique passwords for each account that you have.

Note that the 1password password manager is different from the 1password password generator that I’ve been describing above. The generator simply creates strong passwords. The manager stores those passwords and fills them into websites for you.

In my experiences in helping friends set up password managers, they are challenging to get used to. As in, spend an hour-long zoom session in helping them get things set up.

Put another way: password managers are useful tools — but like any tool, they require time to learn. What I’ve found is that it’s exhausting for non-technical users to get the hang of setting up strong, unique passwords and 2-factor authentication with text messages. Once they’ve done that, they often don’t have the patience to set up a password manager.

Complicating things further is the fact that Apple has its own password manager that works on iPhones, iPads, and Safari browsers running on Macs. But it doesn’t work on other Mac browsers. Google has a password manager that works on Chrome browser, but not elsewhere. This can lead to multiple popup windows on a web form, as different password managers vie for your attention. Very confusing, as you can see from the example below:

This is a horrible user interface. Clearly, as an industry, we have work to do to make password managers less confusing.

In summary: if you write down the passwords in a well-secured place, as described above, and use 2-factor authentication, you’ll have taken a huge step forward in your password security.

Extra credit: Google Authenticator

If you’re feeling adventurous, install Google Authenticator on your phone, and use it on sites that support it. Especially your Google accounts, and especially if you use Google Sheets to store your passwords.

Google Authenticator is more secure using text messages. But if you can’t get it to work, understand that text messages are pretty good, and a LOT better than a password by itself.

Here’s how to use Google Authenticator to secure your Gmail (and thus your Google account and Google Sheets):

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Hope this helps. It’s a long post, but that’s because it’s an incredibly important topic. Again, we’re talking about your life savings, credit history, and other important aspects of your personal finances.

Thanks for reading to the end. Let me know if you have any questions!

Note to techies

You’ll notice I didn’t dive into discussions of combinatorics, SMS hijacking, encryption at rest, or quantum cracking. The goal here is to give non-technical folks a set of steps and principles that are hopefully easy-to-follow and improves their security posture.

With that in mind, how would you improve this post for non-techies? Let me know via a comment or email to alsargent at gmail.

I hope this will be helpful with you in going through your journey of carpal tunnel surgery preparation and post-op. Yes, it's a long read. But I encourage you to go through all of it because this literally could impact the rest of your life.

Let's dive in.

How did I get here?

First, context. I first started getting numbness in my left hand about five years ago. It wasn't through typing which is very common among carpal tunnel surgery patients. It was probably through competitive sailboat racing where you have to hold on to a rope tightly for hours at a time.

I saw a hand specialist at a local orthopedic clinic and he had me do an electromyocardiogram. That was four years ago. An EMG is where they basically zap your arm with a short dose of electrical voltage, and see how long it takes for the electrical current to travel down your arm. The longer the time, the more your nerves are blocked.

At the time he said that my results were borderline in terms of indicating surgery and that I should try physical therapy first. I did, but it didn't help. Four years later I got another EMG and the results were unequivocally that I needed to get surgery.

Specifically, I had blockage in my medial nerve, which controls the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger. Unlocking that would require an incision on my wrist to loosen up a ligament. I also had blockage in my ulnar nerve. That controls the ring finger and pinky finger. Unlocking that would require an incision on my elbow and moving, or transposing, the nerve from my elbow to higher up on my arm. It would also require my arm to be in a sling for longer than with standard carpal tunnel surgery, which means more muscle atrophy any longer physical therapy recovery process.

The ulnar nerve blockage, to me, suggests that the cause os my hand numbness is primarily due to sailing. Typically after a long regatta, I'll have a lot of strain on my pinky and ring finger, to the point where even if I'm wearing gloves I'll have lots of skin worn off if I don't wear weightlifting tape.

Do online research to generate questions, not for answers

Treat everything you read online, including this, as prompts for questions to ask your doctor, not medical advice.

Watch some patient journey videos so you can see what you might expect. I found this video to be informative:

“Might” is a key word here. This guy had much more pain than I did in the first 48 hours. However, he only had carpal tunnel release a scar on his wrist. I’ve got that as well as a scar on my elbow for the ulnar nerve. So my arm will be in a sling for a while and I will have more muscle atrophy, where his arm was able to move.

Check out Bob and Brad, who have a lot of informative physical therapy videos. Including these videos for carpal tunnel syndrome. Again, this is not to provide advice but rather generate questions for you to ask your doctor.

Picking a physician

I was told earlier this summer, by an older orthopedic surgeon, to go with a younger surgeon because they are trained on the latest techniques. And this was after a couple of glasses of wine. In vino veritas!

I’m glad I did, because she (yes, my doctor is a she) did a great job and I had much less pain and numbness but I have heard other people experiencing.

Here is the surgeon that I used. As you can see, there’s a lot of badassery in her bio: 2x board-certified, Magna Cum Laude, NIH funding, published five times, presented at 25 conferences, residency at UCSF, and awarded intern of the year.

The point is, look for someone not just good, but someone exceptionally good. And if you don't live in a metro area with great hospitals, considering traveling for your surgery. It's a few days in a hotel, but a lifetime of relief if done right.

Ask how many people in both the doctors office, and the surgical center, have not been vaccinated against Covid, for whatever reason. Health, religious, etc. I'm very glad that number was zero for my doctor and her team.

Once you've settled on your doctor, make sure that you have their cell phone, email, and access to any private web portals that they use. They're often have a physicians assistant who is medically knowledgeable and can field questions; make sure you have their contact information as well.

Questions you can ask your doctor

Here are some questions that you can ask your doctor as you prepare for surgery. Obviously this is not a complete list but hopefully helps round out your knowledge of what to ask.

1. What surgical procedures am I getting done?
2. How many of these surgical procedures have you done in your career?
3. How many of these procedures do you do per week?
4. What is your success rate with these procedures?
5. When a surgery isn't a success, what are some typical outcomes? How to remedy them?
6. How many surgeries do you typically do in a day? Do you do them in parallel, or one at a time?
7. What painkillers will you prescribe? When do you anticipate that I will be able to shift to over-the-counter painkillers? What about alternative painkillers like CBD?
8. What surgery center will you work perform the operation at? How often do you work there? What is their address, phone, and email?
9. What anesthesiologist will you work with? How often do you work with them? What is their address, phone, and email?
10. After surgery, who do I contact after hours if I have questions, or if the pain seems excessive?
11. After surgery, what physical therapist will I work with? When will that start? What is their address, phone, and email?
12. Before surgery, will you mark the arm to be operated on and the incisions to make? Will this be before the IV is inserted?
13. Will I have a nerve block during surgery, and if so, how long after surgery should I anticipate that block wearing off and me starting on painkillers?
14. Can we schedule the follow up appointments now, before I go into surgery?
15. My phone blocks unknown callers. Could you please share with me the phone number that or their assistant will be calling from I can ensure that it is not blocked?
16. After surgery, what finger mobilization should I do to promote healing?
17. Who do you recommend that I use for physical therapy? A few choices would be good so I can ensure that I find somebody in network.
18. When should I schedule my first physical therapy appointment? Can I book that before surgery?
19. How long should I keep the sling on?
20. How long should I keep the splint on?
21. When will I be able to type?
22. When can I remove the bandage from the I.V.?
23. How long should I do ice for?
24. How long should I keep my arm elevated?
25. Is there a time when I can start to safely drink coffee again?
26. When is it OK to drink alcohol in moderation, along the lines of a glass of wine with dinner?
27. How many people in your not office have not been vaccinated against Covid?
28. How many people in the surgical center have not been vaccinated against Covid?
29. What are your covid vaccination requirements for patients?
30. What are your covid vaccination requirements for caregivers who drop off and pick up patients?
31. Where can my caregiver park when they’re dropping me off for surgery? Can they stay at the facility during surgery?
32. After surgery, will I be in a wheelchair to my caregiver’s car? How far is the trip to their car? Is it covered in case of rain or snow?
33. What is my current grip strength in both hands? (You’ll want to know this to measure your recovery progress after surgery.)

Big things to line up beforehand

This will sound kind of random, but if you’re due for one, get a colonoscopy before you get carpal tunnel surgery. The reason is that you are put under anesthesia, for a relatively easy procedure. So it’s kind of like surgery with training wheels. This helped me because I have never had surgery before. Going into surgery, I was nervous, but not about the anesthesia part.

Line up a good friend or significant other stay with you for the first 48 hours (or more) to make sure that all is good. And by “good” I mean someone willing to give you a sponge bath after surgery.

Confirming insurance: CPT codes

Here are some tips for those of us lucky enough to work with the American health care system.

We've all heard the horror stories around surgical procedures that were not covered by insurance. So, I wanted to check with my insurance company to make sure that all was good to go. I have not yet gotten an exclamation of benefits, but as I write this here are some things that seemed to be good to do.

As I understand it, there are at least two kinds of carpal tunnel release: the traditional one which is more invasive, and the endoscopic one which is less invasive but does not work in all situations. Also, you need to know if you are getting ulnar nerve surgery done as well. This from the surgeon or the surgeons assistant before you leave your consultation meeting.

You need to understand the exact procedures you are definitely getting done. And which procedures you might get done. The reason for this distinction is that sometimes a surgeon will need to “call an audible” and switch to a different procedures mid-surgery. They might initially try endoscopic , but then realize that they need to shift to a more invasive traditional procedure to get the job done.

What do you need to do as a patient is to ensure that your insurance company covers you for all possible procedures that a surgeon might need to do. Don't assume that an insurance company is going to do this by default.

In the healthcare industry, just about every procedure has a CPT code. This is similar to how some restaurants number each of the items on the menu, except the menu for healthcare has tens of thousands of listings. So, you need to get the CPT codes for all procedures that your surgeon will do, and for all the procedures they might do.

Then you need to get written authorization that your insurance company approves of all these CPT numbers.

Using CPT numbers is crucial because there are multiple CPT numbers for carpal tunnel release. For traditional carpal tunnel release, I believe this is 64721. For endoscopic, 29848. And here are the ulnar nerve codes. Of course, double check on all these by asking your doctor.

Confirming insurance: NPI numbers

Next, you need to understand that your surgeon, the surgery center, and your anesthesiologist all need to be in-network with your insurance company. You would think that this would be a package deal. Especially given the high price that we are paying for surgery. But no. You need to separately confirm that each one of these is in network.

To do this you need to ensure that you are accurately identify each one of these medical providers. To do that you should get their NPI number, as well as their Tax ID number. For the surgery center, this might be called a facility code. All this will make it easier to reference those providers when you call your insurance company.

Confirming insurance: building a paper trail

No you might be thinking: it's 2021. Why can't I look all this up on my insurance company's website? You would think that it would be a core capability of an insurance company to have a complete and accurate website that steers you to their in-network providers.

But unfortunately, my insurance provider’s website was inaccurate and did not list all their providers. So I had to burn up a couple of hours of their time during several phone calls. If anything, it was a great education and why the American healthcare system spends more than other countries, for worse outcomes.

During each call, get the name and email of each person you talk to as well as the call reference number of the conversation. Then follow up with a confirmation email the conversation and giving insurance company a chance to correct any in accurate statements. Conversely, if they do not correct for the statements you should be able to but they are correct.

You want to build up a substantial paper trail in case there's any dispute with the insurance company after surgery. Don't forget that insurance companies are for-profit entities and they will pray on the weak — those who have not done their homework. A good paper trail is Kryptonite for insurance companies.

Confirming insurance: what you actually pay

Ultimately, you want to know what is your out of pocket costs per surgery. This will be a function the difference of the billed amount and covered amount, your unused deductible, if any, and the co-insurance portion. Co-insurance isn’t insurance at all, but rather what you as a patient are individually responsible for paying. By using a misleading term like this, insurance companies are doing are great job of rallying popular support for their demise.

Insurance coverage questions

Here are your questions to ask, using the healthcare industry’s native language of CPT codes and NPI numbers. The first two are an expansion on one of the above questions, now that we have more background.

1. What surgical procedures am I definitely getting done? What are their CPT codes?
2. What surgical procedures am I possibly getting done? What are their CPT codes?
3. What physical therapy activities will I need post-therapy? What are their CPT codes?
4. What is the NPI number, taxpayer ID number, billing phone number, and billing email of the surgeon that I am using?
5. What is the NPI number, taxpayer ID number, billing phone number, and billing email of the surgery center that I am using?
6. What is the NPI number, taxpayer ID number, billing phone number, and billing email of the anesthesiologist that I am using?
7. What is the NPI number, taxpayer ID number, billing phone number, and billing email of the physical therapist that I am using?
8. Are these NPI numbers in-network for my insurance plan?
9. Are these CPT codes covered by my insurance plan?
10. Do I have authorization for all possible CPT codes, performed by the NPI numbers and taxpayer ID numbers of my surgeon, anesthesiologist, surgery center, and physical therapist? What is the authorization number and authorization date?
11. What is my unused deductible?
12. Can I use my FSA to pay this unused deductible?
13. What amount will be billed by the surgeon, surgery center, and anesthesiologist to the insurance company? What portion of this will the insurance company cover, and what portion of that is coinsurance to be paid by me?

Ultimately, you want to work through the math and come to a dollar amount that you are likely to pay out of pocket. Then put that into one more of your confirmation email see you create one more step in your paper trail.

Preparing yourself and your home

Prepare your home so that your postop recovery is a stress-free as possible. Bills paid, house clean, laundry done, sheets clean, out of office message turned on. If you live somewhere like San Francisco, make sure you’re parked somewhere where you’re not going to get a ticket for a week or so.

Make sure you’re stocked up with food that can be prepared with one hand. Jars are brutal. Transfer items in jars to tightly-sealed Tupperware containers so that you can open them up with one hand.

Have grippy oven mitts that will make it easier for you to unscrew other items before your grip strength is restored.

Knives are a challenge. Pre-cut as much food as you can.

Download videos, podcasts, and books so that you can zone out for a day or two and I have to deal with any hassles around WiFi that you need to troubleshoot. Plugging and unplugging devices will be very hard if not impossible with one hand. Charge all your devices.

Work out how to do dictation to your laptop so you can more easily dictate text like I am right now. This article goes into more depth. Make sure your AirPods are fully charged and paired with your laptop to make the dictation more accurate. Set up Grammarly to catch errors that inevitably come up during dictation.

Have baby wipes next to the toilet, since you will not be able to bathe for a few days.

Buy 13 gallon bags with a drawstring for bathing without getting your bandages wet. These are big enough to cover your arm up to your shoulder. The drawstring help keep water out.

Get 48 hour deodorant because it might be that long after surgery before you can reapply.

Get floss sticks, since you're not gonna be able to use your hand to floss your teeth.

Take anything that is in a high shelf, that requires you to get up on a step stool and put it somewhere lower. You do not want to have a fall after surgery.

Buttons are brutal with one hand. Have sweats, shorts, and shirts without them.

Get Tide pods, since they don’t require you to unscrew detergent containers.

Build up your shoulder muscle strength and flexibility. Since one of your arms will be in a brace, you will need to keep it lifted when you are bathing for maybe 20 minutes or so. Here is a workout you can consider.

Build the grip strength in your other hand. It will need to do double duty during your chores through the day. It will also need to be very good at opening jars and doors by itself. I have found the Prohands Gripmaster to work well.

Build your balance and core strength, whether via yoga, a standing desk, surfing, or some other activities. I shudder to think what would happen if I fell on my arm post op.

Spend time doing everyday tasks with one hand. Those that require two, you need to address.

Have stool softener on hand. Also buy lots of fruits and vegetables with fiber, the day before surgery. Peel the citrus fruit and put into a sealed tupperware. I explain why below.

Have three ice packs if you were getting just carpal tunnel release and only need to ice your wrist. Have six ice packs if you're also getting your ulnar nerve released and need to ice your wrist and elbow. This way you can have one or two ice pack in use with the others being chilled in the freezer. Ice plus over the counter medication can help you avoid taking opioids which, as explained below, can be a very good thing.

Pain management

Before the big day, write up a medication schedule on a piece of paper and put it somewhere easily accessible and visible. List out the next few days across the top, and list your time slots, e.g., midnight, 4 AM, 8 AM etc. going down the left side of the page. In each box, track whether you took — opioids, Motrin, Tylenol , etc.— during that time slot, and at what dosage.

This way, if you need to talk to your doctor around post op pain issues, you will have a clear and complete record of information that you can scan and email to them.

(This is why it’s important to have not just their cell phone, but also their email. Sometimes when working with the medical profession, you encounter this ad resistance to communicating in a streamlined manner. So make sure you have your doctor’s email because sometimes that’s the easiest way to communicate.)

Try to get your opioid medication before surgery, so it’s one less thing to go wrong. And so you can unscrew the cap before you go in for surgery. Stock up on over-the-counter painkillers Motrin and Tylenol. CBD too, if that's something you're doing. Citrus fruit, salad, fiber gummies, anything to keep your gut filled with fiber.

I only had to take three opioid pills post-surgery which I’m thankful for. I was prescribed hydrocodone/acetaminophen 5–325 TB, which has the brand name Norco. The postop papers I was given say it has a 25% addiction rate which is crazy. The sooner you can shift to a combination of Motrin and ibuprofen, or maybe CBD, the better.

I found it helpful to shift to the following schedule for pain medication:

• midnight: Motrin/ibuprofen
• 4 am: Tylenol/acetaminophen
• 8 am: ibuprofen
• noon: Motrin
• 4 pm: Tylenol
• 8 pm: Motrin

Motrin: max 800mg per dose. which is 4 pills, 2400mg max/day.

Tylenol: max 100mg per dose, which is 2 pills, 3000mg max per day.

This is what worked for me, but ask your doctor. If you were on blood thinners, for instance, all that Motrin could negatively impact wound healing. The bigger point: plan a specific pain management dosage schedule with your doctor, then write out that schedule in detail, knowing how many pills to take per that schedule. Not milligrams, pills — you want to keep it simple when you're feeling loopy. And have a pad of paper to log what medication you took.

One video that I saw after surgery recommended CBD as a very effective painkiller for post op recovery. That would be worth asking your doctor about so that you have another tool in your pain management toolbox. If it helps you stay off of opioids, that is a great thing. 25%.

In my case, 48 hours after my surgery, I did not need any more Tylenol or Motrin. I'm assuming this is the result of choosing a really good surgeon. This is just one data point and I'm sure your mileage will vary.

What about all that fiber I mentioned? Well if you’re squeamish or eating now, you might want to stop reading here. I learned that opioids, in addition to being highly addictive, basically turn your poop into cement. I didn’t have a bowel movement for a couple of days, even though I've been eating salads and fruit. 48 hours after I got off opioids, let’s just say it was moving day. So, if and when I do this again, for my right elbow, I’m gonna be pretty much on a high fiber diet before and after surgery.

Build a project plan

Consider the economics of surgery: doctors make money for the actual surgical procedure, but not for what happens after the operation. There’s no CPT code for post-op advice over email or phone. There’s a CPT for in-person post-op visits, yes, but no CPT for postop telehealth, which would typically takes less time than a visit. Yet another inefficiency for an industry stuck in the 1950s.

Lawyers can bill for time spent on emails, calls, and Zooms; doctors should be able to as well.

But that’s not the world we live in. So, there is little incentive for a surgeon to invest in providing you with guidance around what to do after the operation. This means you need to build your own project plan of what to do when after surgery, during the billable time of an in-person visit, and to be efficient by sending the questions above in advance.

Even doctors that are excellent at their craft won't think of all the different details that patient needs. For instance, my doctor had me sign up for a private messaging portal after surgery, which required me to fill out a form, not easy to deal with one hand.

It's helpful to keep in mind that medicine is a field where a book on the importance of checklists was a major revelation to doctors. Which is kind of crazy when you think of how other skilled professionals to hold peoples lives in their hands, such as airline pilots, have been using checklist for decades.

As you talk to your doctor, map out what will happen on the days post surgery. This is something I dramatically failed in. And a major motivation of my writing this post.

This is frustrating given the high price that we pay as patients. We’re getting a fast food experience for Rolls Royce prices. But it’s the reality that we face.

Week before surgery

I got my Covid booster on the Wednesday before my surgery, which happened on a Tuesday.

I got my Covid PCR test on Saturday morning which was 72 hours prior. As it turned out, I did not get my test results until the morning of surgery. That was nerve-racking, because a negative test result was required for surgery. I hate to think what kind of insurance dispute I would have if surgery had been canceled at the last minute. After talking to the physicians assistant, he said that they have been recommending that people get the PCR test four days prior to surgery. This is one more example of how medically knowledgeable people can fail in terms of managing the surgical process. And why you need to do it for yourself as a patient.

I had a big meal at about 8:30 PM the day before my surgery, and had my last drink of water at about 11:45 PM. This is to comply with the doctors orders not to eat or drink anything the day of surgery.

I made sure that I had my drivers license to serve as my ID, credit card, insurance card, and vaccination card all in my wallet. I should have taken all other cards out of my wallet since this is just one more thing to get lost. A Costco card does not help a whole lot during surgery.

I had the address of the surgical center already plugged into a calendar invite that I sent to my caregiver who is driving me to and from the operation. I also should have had information of where to park but thankfully we lucked out and had parking nearby.

Day of surgery

It's OK if you're scared. This is a big deal. But remember, you did a lot of preparation that will serve you well.

Grab a shower, shave, and take care of all your personal grooming needs for the next few days. For me it was a couple days before I could take a bath after surgery.

I wore a loose shirt that was synthetic , which I did not care much about. Being loose, it was easy to get back into after surgery. Being synthetic, it did not hold body odor as much as a cotton shirt would. And being older, I wouldn’t have any issues with having to cut the shirt in order to get out of it in order to take a sponge bath.

I wore shoes that are easy to pull on and off. I didn't wear contacts. I wore jeans, but sweats would have been a better choice.

Take a few pictures of yourself before surgery. They will be a nice complement of your postop photos. Here’s mine.

When you get changed into your gown, request an extra plastic bag for your shoes to go into.

Use the restroom one last time before you get your IV inserted. I'm sure the surgical staff will clean your arm, but I made sure to use a lot of hand sanitizer just to be doubly sure.

Before I got my IV installed, the surgeon marked what incisions she was going to make my arm, and put her initials as well. This is something that I urge you as a patient to insist is done before the IV is installed.

It turned out that the anesthesiologist was a friend of a sailing friend and a good conversationalist. That led to a nice conversation about different sailboat races that I had done, and when I was in mid-sentence, I was out.

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After surgery, they asked me if I wanted anything to eat. I chose the animal crackers and water. After maybe an hour of waking up, my caregiver picked me up and took me home.

The nerve block wore off after a few hours and I was able to slightly wiggle my fingers. My instructions were to not move them very much the first day. Thankfully there was no numbness in any of my fingers. I told that for some patients, numbness can persistence is or even weeks. Your mileage will vary.

No one told me that I could remove the bandage from the IV a few hours after surgery. As a result, it dug into my hand for 24 hours until I finally was able to speak to someone I could remove it. Another example of how the medical profession is not good at project management.

After surgery: day one

Here are some thoughts on that project plan that I will hopefully fill out over time.

The guidance that I heard was, for the first couple of days, don’t do anything that requires judgment. And it's true. Even though I think I didn't have impaired judgment when I look at the first draft of this blog post that I wrote after 48 hours it had all kinds of miscommunication.

The day of surgery I pretty much hung out on the couch, took my opioid painkillers, and vegged. I read the postop guide they handed me before I left, which was incredibly sparse, hence this blog post.

I drank a lot of water to try to flush out the anesthesia from surgery out of my body so I could start to clear my head.

After surgery: day two

I scheduled my follow-up appointment with my surgeon. I still need to make a follow-up appointment with my physical therapy but I won’t start for another month given that I had ulnar nerve release. If you only had medial nerve release, you might start physical therapy earlier.

I experimented with switching to over-the-counter pain medication, and was happy to see that worked.

I emailed my surgeon and her assistant a bunch of the questions above, which I wished I had asked before surgery.

I brushed my teeth, flossed, put a bit of water on my face, and reapplied deodorant, so I was not a complete slob.

I went out for dinner and walk slowly, with my caregiver on my left side, ready to body-check anyone that came to close to me. We ate a big salad that was helpful a day later for reasons explained above.

After surgery: day three

I took a couple of Tylenol in the morning and that was it in terms of what I needed for pain management. This won't be the case for everyone. In one video I saw, the patient felt like his hand had been run over by a truck on day three. But he knew that it would be temporary and the pain would subside over the coming days.

I was able to start to lift my arm, while keeping it in the sling, in order to exercise my shoulder.

I walked around a bit to get an errand done. Walking down the stairs I held onto the railing. I have a good sense of balance and this is something I never do, but which I did this time, because the impact of a fall would be very bad. I was super careful while crossing the street and made sure to make eye contact with the drivers so that they could see there was a dude in a sling that they absolutely did not want to hit.

I started writing this blog post and it had all kinds of crazy typos. Again a testament to why you don't wanna do anything crucial right after surgery.

I took a bath and just washed from my waist down. Very, very carefully so that I wouldn't get my bandages wet.

After surgery: day four

Woke up pain-free. I was able to easily wiggle all the fingers in my left hand, but still and being careful not to overdo anything. Lifting my arm in a sling is easy.

Took a full-body bath and got a shave. Covered my left arm in a 13 gallon plastic bag with drawstring to keep it from getting wet. To prepare, I made sure I could do 10 reps of waiting by arm in a sling above my head, before taking off the sling. My caregiver pulled the bag up all the way to my shoulder, so no water would get into my bandages, and helped me wash my right arm and back, as well as dry them off, and apply deodorant to my right arm pit. The point is, your caregiver has to be someone who's willing to see you naked and somewhat helpless in a bath tub.

I felt great afterwards being clean.

After surgery: day five

Woke up pain-free once again in my left hand and arm. Ironically, my right elbow, which was not operated on, more sore. This is a chronic, golfers elbow condition that I am trying to treat through physical therapy. I am guessing that it is getting stressed because I have not been doing my PT exercises recently and because I am doing everything with my right hand.

I am regularly doing reps of 10 reps of my left arm over my head to keep my left shoulder relatively strong and flexible.

I can regularly wiggle my left fingers through maybe 10° range of motion for a few seconds before things feel uncomfortable.

Since I was well off of painkillers, I went to a local brew pub with my friend. They drove. We ordered two flights. When I saw how much was in each sample — not a shot, but half a glass — I cancelled the second flight. No need to risk stumbling and falling.

After surgery: day six

No pain. Doing shoulder lifts and finger wiggles. I really wish I had a PT to consult with to know what is the right amount to do. The physician’s assistant is saying, “let pain be your guide,” but I don’t want to overdo things and mess up my recovery. I wish the same level of precision was put into my postop activities as my surgery.

I just remembered a on-armed action hero — Furiosa of the Mad Max franchise. It might seem silly to anyone who hasn’t gone through carpal tunnel surgery, but it’s important to have role models for recovery — and that’s what Furiosa is. I find myself asking, “what would Furiosa do in this situation?” (I’m not saying that being without the use of an arm for a few weeks is anything like losing one permanently.)

I want to get rid of the 25%-addiction-rate opioids. I check the prescription information printout from Walgreens. It says, “check with your pharmacist on the best way to dispose of these drugs.”

You really want me to spend 30 minutes calling my pharmacy and waiting on hold? Why not just explain on the printout? Yet another paper-cut contributing to American healthcare inefficiency.

If any doctors are reading this: the reason so many of your patients come to you with information they find online (of dubious validity) is that your industry, frankly, does a horrible job at keeping them informed. This is not news. “Ask your doctor” should be a last resort, not the default guidance it is today.

Thankfully, this time google points me to an authoritative site — the US FDA — which says that I can safely flush Norco down the toilet. So I do. Relief.

After surgery: day 13

I got the sling and bandages off today in the doctor’s office. The physician’s assistant snipped off the stitches. Really was disconcerting to have my arm unprotected. My instructions were that I could leave my arm in the sling to keep it elevated and help reduce swelling.

Afterwards, my surgeon looked at my hand. My mobility was much less than she expected. I could barely move my fingers. So, she moved up my physical therapy from four weeks from post-op to three weeks post-op. She gave me instructions to move my fingers and wrist much more, as much as I could without pain.

Shortly after this, I went to the gym regularly. My “workouts” were all around trying to move my fingers and wrist more and more every day. I’d spend anywhere from an hour to two trying to do this. It takes time.

After surgery: day 22

First day at physical therapy. I went to Golden Gate Hand Therapy, which specializes in fingers, hands, and wrists. You walk in, and that’s all they’re doing. Having done sessions with them, it makes sense. Hands are complex, with lots of nerves and thus pain sensitivity.

My hand is super swollen. “Hulk hands” is what a friend calls them. My therapist says that we need to get the swelling down, so that the gunk in my hands doesn’t coagulate. Yikes!

We worked on bending my fingers, wrist, and elbow. I was pretty stiff. I couldn’t touch my thumb to my forefinger, nor could I touch my head. So we worked on pushing through.

One key thing is to have the same therapist each time. You need to build trust with your therapist, so you know that they won’t harm you. This is easier said than done: pushing my wrist and fingers DOES lead to mild pain, maybe a three or four on a scale of ten.

In this age of COVID-19, we are all wearing masks, so my physical therapist can’t see me gritting my teeth under my mask. So I’ve gotten in the habit of calling out pain measurements as she bends my fingers or wrist: “1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4”. She knows to hold at four.

The best example I can think of is those physical trainers who stretch the hamstrings of football players as they’re warming up. They need to push hard… but not so hard that they snap a hamstring. As the recipient of this therapy, you are helpless and need to put full trust in your PT. For this reason, you can’t have a new person each time. So, insist on the same therapist each time.

One thing we do is heat therapy. I did my hand and forearm in hot wax, which they cover with Saran wrap.

Then they put it into a hot pad with a cover on it. It’s effective in boosting blood flow, which reduces swelling and increases mobility of the wrist and fingers. All this aids in recovery.

To do the same thing at home, I order the hot pad and cover, both of which are sold by a company called Chattanooga. I start doing this at home a few times a day.

To heat the pads, I use a large stainless steel pot with lid to heat up the water. I set a timer for about 15 minutes, so that the water is hot without being scalding. Then I use tongs to get the hot pad out.

Sometimes the hot pad is too hot. In those cases, I use a towel for an extra layer of insulation.

Another thing they do is putty therapy: having me play with very malleable putty. It’s called TheraPutty, from a company called CanDo. I get the tan color, which is extra extra soft.

After surgery: day 23

Every day, I take a couple of ibuprofen (Motrin) to help reduce inflammation in my hand, as well as to encourage myself to be more adventurous in moving my hand and wrist. Each tablet is 200mg, so this 400mg dose is well below the 800mg max dosage.

After surgery: day 24

My caregiver suggests that, at night, I rest my hand on a thick pillow that is on my chest. This way, my hand is well above my body, and the swelling will start to reduce. I sleep really soundly, so my hand stays on the pillow all night. Over the next few days, the swelling goes down markedly. However, my lower back starts getting sore and hamstrings tight, given that one shoulder is flexed forward (towards the ceiling all evening).

After several days, I stop doing this so I save my back. But it’s been good to reduce the swelling. It’s also amazing how everything in the body is connected. Who’d have thought that a swollen wrist leads to tight hamstrings?

After surgery: day 25

T-day! “T” here stands for typing. I can bend my elbow up to mid-chest and twist my hands inward to type with a standard keyboard. This makes me more productive for work, but more crucial, gets my fingers moving for several hours a day. That means more blood going to my hand, to carry out more of the gunk causing my hands to swell up.

Graduation: day 99

99 days after surgery, I “graduated” from physical therapy. Meaning that, after 14 weeks (3.5 months), my hand therapist felt that they did all they could with their services. Here’s a photo of me and my therapist:

A good day indeed!

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

But one weird thing is that I am left with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) in my left hand. It’s a rare condition, with fewer than 200,000 cases in the US each year.

In my case, I don’t have pain in my left hand, but a lack of mobility in that I cannot easily make a fist. Joint stiffness, and decreased ability to move my left fingers. According to my surgeon, my brain thinks there’s been some trauma to my fingers, and is immobilizing them so they can heal. The way to address it is to keep working out, keep doing heat therapy, and keep pushing my fingers to make a fist.

My arm strength is okay, and getting better. Here I’m holding a 20 pound barbell. (Notice the barely-visible scar.) It’s just that I can’t firmly grip anything that’s less than half an inch in diameter.

Hopefully this goes away.

Tendonitis

My surgeon said to watch out for tendonitis. Before surgery, I didn’t even know what tendonitis felt like. Now I do. Thankfully, I only get it when I do pullups.

Per-surgery, I used to be able to rip off a dozen pullups. Now I struggle to do just a couple, and if I do three, I feel tendonitis in my left arm, indicating that I need to back off.

Back in the saddle

Even with CRPS and tendonitis, I’ve been able to get back to competitive sailing. I’ve got more work to do in order to get stronger, but I can still get a boat around this course, as I’m doing here in March 2022: